All Welcome like gathered embers

Salt and desaturated greengray foam licked amicably at the silver mare’s chest as she slipped out into the waves, hooves digging into the seafloor to keep her balance as the waves rolled in and out of the dirty shore – glittering with fragments of seashell and distant, from her position at the edge of a sandbank. The screech of gulls was barely audible over the bellow of wind as they dove in and out of the horizon, dark silhouettes cast against the midday sun and periwinkle-blue sky, still coated in a fine layer of nebulous white even in the wake of a storm that had ravaged the coast the previous night, judging by the state of the driftwood and beached jellyfish strewn out along the shoreline. That was, however, before the tide had rolled in. When it trickled back out in a few hours, she imagined that no signs of the storm would remain at all. The ocean had a way of wiping away all but the sturdiest ridges and crags that lined it, and even those eventually succumbed to the stubborn pull of time. (She did not visit the coast often, but, whenever she stared out at the ocean waves, she could understand why travelers would occasionally call the Mors “a sea of sand.” Fluttering, changing, fickle – and unyielding. Seraphina knew that she couldn’t drown in the dunes, but sometimes she felt like she could.)

She could not see the ground through the murk as it settled and bobbed in equal measures around her legs, though she thought that she could occasionally catch a glimpse of silver scales, flickering and flashing like pale fire in the sunlight. There were far larger beasts in the Terminus, and deadlier ones, but they rarely ventured so close to shore; these were simply minnows, their absentminded curiosity sending them darting between her legs or nibbling at her heels, terribly unafraid of the far larger creature – or what they could see of her, with their strange little bubbles of eyes. Seraphina thought that they were quite strange for it, and quite bold. She would have been a bit impressed, had she not seen them snatched up by seabirds in droves, though their feathered assailants had fled as she had swum to the bank, and they dared not return while her presence remained. Giving a small shake of her legs to allow her small, scaled companions to scatter before she dragged her comparably behemoth form into motion again, she clambered out of her hole in the sand, and, pushing off with her hindquarters, returned to swimming – or, rather, floating. As soon as her hooves left the sand, she allowed her body to drift, though her cautious gaze flitted between the horizon and the bank. After her encounter in the Maze, she had been forcing herself to learn to swim, and, if she were to ever find the nerve to dive beneath the surface, she knew that she had to become comfortable with water, the way it ebbed and flowed. However, she was also well aware of the temper of the Terminus, and she did not want to chance allowing the tide to drag her out to the open ocean.

(When she closed her eyes, there was still black water in her mouth – in her eyes, on her tongue, swallowing her, choking her, dragging her deeper and deeper and deeper.) So she kept them open and watched the gulls again, their chatter a cold comfort from the murky unfamiliarity (and her own prickling sense of uncertainty) of the sea.