Roselin still isn't accustomed to being up so early. The shadows were still lingering outside her room, in this place that was supposed to be home but was not. The sky was still waiting for the sun to wake and it was greeted by Roselin instead who looked guardedly out a paned window at the still-sleeping world. Had she been back in Taiga, she would just be falling asleep now. She'd wrap herself in the pale colors of the coming day and wake up to a blaze, to the sun warming her back and the sunlight dappling through the leaves.
But as she stares about the long shadows of the unfamiliar hall that she walks, she is reminded that this is not home.
There are others who call this little cottage home. Faces that Rosey supposes she will come to know in time. She knows nothing about the souls who dwell behind the closed doors that live with her Aunt Elena. (She knows something of them. Roselin can hear her mother telling her again of the golden aunt and the cousin that she would meet. The ones she would come to know, and as Lilliana assured her, would come to love as well.)
She paces the hall, not trying to creep but she doesn't want to wake up the others. The cliffs outside are not ones she knows but Roselin thinks that they can't be so different than the crags of her birthland; in her youthful naivete, she assumes that one coast must look like all the others. They are just edges of the world, places where the earth fell apart and crumbled into the sea. They are just places waiting to be reunited with all the other lost things that got misplaced somewhere along the horizon.
The boards beneath her hooves creak and groan much like the Redwoods did in a storm. Roselin takes a deliberate step to the side as to not make any more noise but the little cottage seems intent on announcing her presence through the dimly-lit corridor. The silver-black filly lifts her head as if that might help distribute her weight better and takes a lighter step and then another. She had been a girl raised among brothers and this self-awareness is new to her. Roselin had always just charged headlong in the antics of her siblings without a thought or care to the way her body bent or curved or angled.
There it is again. That longing and Roselin aches for all the things she has left behind: her father and mother, her twin Oren, her older brothers Nashua and Yanhua. But what she could learn here could help the North. She knows that this place - this Terrastella - with its knowledge of healing and hospitals (and even better, flower gardens) could help her still-scarred home.
It's an upside world for Roselin and so she moves quietly through the cottage, craving the fresh salt air and the wide view of a still-gray dawn. The dwelling is still mostly unknown to her and the pale-maned girl brushes up against the edge of a table and eyes the hanging herbs that surround her. Out, she thinks and Roselin is nearly as quick out the front door as the flooding relief she feels. There is no need to be careful or silent in the waiting wilds and the yearling is drawn to the cliffs, to the sweeping views that are waiting for her. The path she takes is well-worn and Rose doesn't spend much time contemplating the other wanderers who might have come this way.
It doesn't occur to Roselin that she will see her out on these sharp cliffs; not her soft aunt. What was she doing out here? (She never heard the story of cliffdancer, windwalker Elena, a lover of ledges.) The girl stops but all those careless days in Taiga don't prevent her from kicking up the gravel, preventing a hushed escape from the palomino mare, and it doesn't stop the healer from looking her way. Terrastella and the cliffs and the cottage are so foreign to Roselin but the blue eyes that peer towards her are not. They are a shade of blue she has known her entire life; they are the exact shade of her mother's eyes.
"Oh," she murmurs softly, looking down to the ground as if she might find an apology there. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't realize that anybody else would be here."
