The ocean was a familiar friend for the fallen knight. The crash of waves against the chalk white cliffs had been his lullaby as a child, the counselor of his youth, and the drumbeat of his marches. It had even been dirge that saw him off the island, away from the home that he would have laid his life down for. To leave, and to choose to live elsewhere. To devote himself to another cause- could he do that? As scars had healed and muscle regrew, he had found the strength of his body again. But not his conviction. The place in him that had once welled with purpose now lay empty and hollow in his chest, echoing his failure like a bell with every gentle thump of the copper pendant he wore. That too had once meant something.
So he'd come to the ocean. As it had once been his silent counselor so he sought it again. This time though, he had no words. The cliffs seemed darker here than the ones at home, both because the stone was darker but also because the water seemed to churn more violently. The wind whipped his mane, the coarse strands tangling around his remaining ear and attempting to obscure what remained of his vision. For a moment he closed his eyes and allowed it, welcoming blindness though it did not make him blind to memories. After a moment of reverence, he shook his head to toss the strands away.
His dark eye scanned to beach below as the tide pulled back. There was a cool bite in the wind as summer gave way to the inevitable turning of the year. He though, faintly, he could taste smoke on the wind but it was faint and ethereal as the memory of a dream. Then his eyes fell on a dark, wave tossed shape below, nearly invisible against the color of the water itself. Only the plank of debris the equine lay on drew the attention to her true shape.
Diarmuid plunged down the steep path, rocks skidding as he made his way to the beach of the cove, what little of it was left relatively dry. There he paused, uncertain. Was it a selkie or siren? The lure of some wave-born fae? For a moment superstition gave him pause. But the strange neither cried out pitifully nor beautifully, only rode the waves nearer and nearer. Somehow they had avoided the worst of the rocky breakers and had been driven into the calmer waters of the cove. Powerful legs carried the stallion foreward into the surf, strong lungs carrying his voice across the stretch of water between them.
"Ahoy there!" What most worried him was the apparent unconsciousness of the waterborne stranger. He swam out to meet them, concerned that he might have to help drive them aground on the sand and figure out how to wake them from there. His eye briefly looked to the horizon, seeking sign of where they might of come from. And yet he saw nothing, only the clear horizon framed by the arms of the cove.
@Thaleia :)
