Solira: The Ocean: as if i could forget those years || ANY

It’s been so long.

A year perhaps. Long to some, a blink of the eye to others. I am still young, and so to me it has taken a century for the time to past. I suppose there was nothing barring my return, and yet it went unspoken that I would not return for a year’s time. I had nowhere to go, no reason to leave, and yet nowhere or reason to remain. I was as free as my element, discarded to the wind.

It’s been so long, and yet still I can feel my skin burning.

*

She appeared in a raging wind, the departure of winter and the arrival of spring. Though spring often entered in the quietest of ways (the sprouting of a tiny flower, or the thawing of the frigid ice), it chose then to burst open in a rampage of warm air. It was in the fourth year on the eve of spring that Irene returned, her body aching with the rise in temperature. One would not believe her if she told them that she was burning, always burning on the inside.

Nowhere on her body was there hair, save for a few stringy pieces of mane and tail. Even through the icy winter she had not grown a coat, and yet despite this alarming fact she never once found herself chilled. If anything, the cold brought some relief to the constant flames that licked at her innards, a painful reminder of last year’s events.

She cringed at the idea, quickening her pace towards the sea.

She hardly recognized the smells that greeted her nose, the scents of equine who now inhabited Solira. Perhaps it was to be expected, for the world had not frozen in place upon her departure. Irene felt no sadness from this idea, and in fact embraced the strangeness. It would have been painful for those who knew her to see her in such a state.

Now the record would be wiped clean, her life a new page.

She waded into the gentle caress of low tide, her body finding relief as water engulfed her. She returned to Solira not because it had once been her home, but because it was the only place that would lend her sickly body the relief it cried for. The desert would have been pure torture, and while Andarin was cold enough it lacked the comfort of the sea. As the waves washed over her leathery skin, she sank her muzzle beneath the water’s surface, exhaling in contentment.

It was here that she waited for a change, wishing she could become one with the tides.

IRENE
Solira || Spy || Air III

There's a saltwater film on the jar of your ashes;
Slv. Alshain x Gld. Notte