[open quest] there's thunder in our hearts - round one

[Areane]

It often made Tarian – her father – press his lips into a thin line, and though the gray pegasus never once voiced his disapproval, Areane could see the way that he didn’t particularly relish the thought that his daughter was a storm-seeker. There were other, more practical, ways to spend her time, according to the former Champion of Loess.

Areane heard her father, and some small part of her even understood his misgivings about the way she went cloud-chasing and her thrill at the chance to soar through lightning strikes and thunderclaps. It wasn’t going to bring Loess back, or bring her any closer to discovering what had happened to those missing, like her cousin, the Last Queen.

They were things beyond what the young pegasi could control. And perhaps that was why Areane was beginning to love way the storms that suddenly blew in from the sea that would wail and churn and rattle their way through Tephra, seeming to shake everything but the volcano (well, up until recently). Even that had awakened in the face of all the changes happening across Beqanna.

First, there had been the sinking of her home. The storms in Tephra that she had grown to love. And now there were murmurs of a fog so dense in Taiga that those who wandered in were struggling to find their way out. She had meant to go herself, to see with her own amethyst eyes what was happening in the North and eventually venture her way to Hyaline, to see (or even wait) what might ensue there.

But on a day that fades beautifully – a sunset so vivid on the Tephran coast that it keeps the young wanderer still longer than she might have otherwise been – Areane turns her head to see something darkening that is not the coming night. It is a storm, swirling in an odd manner, over the peak of the Mountain. Her father’s thin line of disapproval comes into her mind, followed by her mother’s worry, and even the memory of Starros’ seems to tell her to stay; but with a quick unfurling, the winged mare takes to the sky and flies, hurrying herself towards the storm.

***

Stranger things transpire still.

Areane flies and flies, to find herself greeted by others who wait to enter the squall. It is no normal storm, or so she (and others) are told by a Fairy who waits to escort them in. It’s an adventure in the making for the young pegasus, and perhaps if she was a more cautious soul, her excitement wouldn’t be as perceptible between her increasingly rapid wingbeats or the way that her eyes light up at the mention of a fee. A nightmare, says the lovely being who seems to be made entirely up of clouds and their shimmer when the sunlight hits just right.

The thought of sharing her worst nightmare – the one she still has from time to time – makes her feel vulnerable. It feels like opening a part of her soul, but as she takes one more look at the swirling clouds before them, Areane decides that she doesn’t mind parting with it. It is a dream of black water, rising and rising and rising. It swallows everything, and leaves nothing behind but a small filly who cries out for her parents and her brother.

Despite her cries, no answer comes and she is left alone, adrift, with no family and no home and nowhere to go.

The dream dissipates, and Areane blinks away her remaining fear. She is glad to be rid of it. Lightning suddenly strikes; giving a strong flap of her dark wings before tucking them neatly against her slim sides, she then dives into the storm.