Across the sea
A pale moon rises
The ships have come to carry you home
Epithet
Epithet felt the mysterious return of life to her body. No longer entirely alone, she was able to distinguish the least little bit of mysticism emanating from the direction of the mountain that she had spotted earlier. She thought, perhaps that because the mountain had not been there previously—and now was—that this probably meant that the mountain had something to do with this whole thing. She was still exhausted, and still filthy, but she stopped for a while and stared at it, intently, almost longingly, almost as if… almost as if it were calling out to her.
So entwined was she in her reverie, that she was caught unaware—and rather embarrassingly, considering her state of physical affairs—by a male whom she did not recognize, but that, in a former life, would not have been someone that she would have considered part of her company. Is your home gone too?
Well, yes. It was. The Deserts had long been flooded, and she had only managed to pull herself together to keep to the common lands, looking for a new place to be. But did Epithet really belong anywhere? What was she, anyhow? Was she still Epithet, drained as she was and uncertain of everything she knew? What was the point of being good, when all the world could do was take everything from you that you had ever known?
So she faced him, adversity flying in the face of diversity, and she grounded herself, settling her weight in the mud before addressing him. “Yes… Yes I supposed it is.” She paused, looking past him to see a pair of males that looked entwined together at the soul. Her eyes widened slightly to see that one of them looked vaguely like her—pregnant, for they had nothing else in common that she knew of—and that the other watched him with the utmost love and protectiveness.
Epithet smiled, moved by the scene; but she was aware that one of them had to have been blessed with old blood; like her, for impossible in this world is the man who is pregnant naturally without the help of a little magic. He whispers his uncertainty, shock, and sadness at having lost his home as well, and then Epithet begins to realize, that this calamity was not just the creation of a few.
This was the entire land.
How could her homeland have betrayed them all like this?
She kept her face serene, but her heart began to blacken, the madness of her mother barely being kept at bay. She huffed, and looked back at the little band of men that had gathered around her, and spoke again, wondering if the one who trailed behind her pregnant friend was the one with whom she would find a quiet connection with; he seemed different, somehow. “Does any of you know what exactly has happened here? I have only just come back, to realize…. That my abilities are not what they used to be.” A beat, where she reached back to itch her still-dirty pelt... feeling slightly self-conscious of how dirty she was. “I am Epithet.”