The sea still frightens her.
She was the ragged avenger, full of guts and grime and piss and vinegar, but the churning of the waves still sends her legs to shake.
Zosma watches it now, her twilight eyes pulled into its movement, her gaze drawn further towards the horizon with each retreating wave. The sunset is bold here. Far bolder than the milky fading of the light at home. Here, the sky is awash in all the colors of a draining fire: reds, oranges, pinks. The spilling ink of night begins to blot out the reaching flames, but the spectacle is glorious even in its death. It distracts her from the sea-spray on her legs and the salt gathering on her lips, its taste as bitter as thoughts of a life that had meant so much to her. Of a life she has now firmly placed behind her.
Her knees buckle at the thought of starting over, because everything she’d had, she’d built herself. Everything she made, she constructed on the sturdy slope of her back. Everything she desired, she poured oceans of her blood and sweat into its acquisition.
She is more than her faults, more than her victories; the past is still difficult to forget.
But here, she can start over. Here, she can weave new faces into the expansive tapestry of all she’s known. She can smudge the remainder of his face from the creeping corners of her brain on the good days. She can pull the smiles and the laughter and the touches of her women to the forefront of her mind on the bad days. Here is different. She, however, stubbornly remains the same.
Zosma cannot turn her back on the sea until it is invisible in the night. When it is as black as the rest of the world around the mare, she makes a quick retreat away from it. The smell of other horses grows stronger the further into the land she moves. The earth grows stronger, too, as reliable dirt replaces the easy give of sand beneath her feet. She smiles at this, the gentle way she is already beginning to accept this new place. For better or for worse. And when she finally stops, the moon is waning in the heavens. The sky lets itself wake to birdsong and a gathering wind stirring the trees. The pale white mare watches the rest of the world follow suit under the shelter of a sturdy oak tree. Its bark is like her skin, flayed and broken. Both are whole, healed, living, though.
She licks her dusky lips and tastes the last vestige of salt.
z o s m a
ooc: side-note, she is also looking for a kingdom home (only Gates, Falls, Chamber, or Valley doh)