She’s left the baby in the playground before dawn even breaks, and makes the short trek from the warm safety of the playground where the foals frolic under the watchful eye of the fae-folk to the field, where the sharks roam as freely as the minnows. Sloene has come here before, and she had followed Aranea home, but the volcanic mountain had only been home because her friend had been there. Without Aranea and Magnus in Tephra, it wasn’t home. The grulla mare had been quite contentedly homeless until there was a baby.
The baby deserves a home. That had been her mistake with the first baby – she’d tried to raise the first one on her own, but it hadn’t been right or good. Tephra echoes emptily without her friends there, and the rest of her old haunts are not right or good. This, this lonely empty place, is where one goes to find a home and a place to raise a child. Though – it’s not as cold and lonely as she remembers. Spring has brought new grass and flowers to the field and a breeze blows warm across her face as she dances lightly from point to point, silver eyes taking in the faces but she isn’t immediately drawn to anyone in particular.
Instead she settles near an edge, quiet and watching. Always watching. Always the ugly duckling amongst the goslings. Though she thinks that’s a stupid saying – goslings are actually very ugly, after all, but ducklings are actually kind of cute. Perhaps it was her many foster-siblings who were ugly, despite their similarities and greater numbers, while the singular quiet regular child might have been the beautiful duckling. After all, her mother might have loved her. She wasn’t left by choice; her mother had died. Perhaps, otherwise, she would have been a duckling amongst ducklings.
She’s not entirely unlike them anymore, those goslings. Her foster-siblings. Outwardly she is still the plain girl, the nothing child, but the quest has given her something beyond dreams of a family that will never be. It has given her an unseeable power, one to match those children she had always envied. Sloene has something to offer a Kingdom now, finally, something to give them. And in turn they will give her and Sochi a home.
ooc; no Ischia, Tephra, or Hyaline please