Welcome to Gaia! ::

A light rain has been falling for the better part of the afternoon, and the sinking sun has dyed the sky a flat, sheenless white: a vast canopy of borderless clouds and a steady fall of cold water.

It is during weather like this that Bitterleaf feels her home is most beautiful. Not a creature given to much introspection on questions of beauty, she nonetheless is pushing her two comrades towards the broken treeline with a strange urgency. When they break, sore-footed, onto the open stretch of coast, she exhales, slowly, and tries in vain to shake the clinging strands from her eyes.

The swath of ocean, chopped and rough under the low winds, spits foam towards the sky, and its waters are grey and stony-seeming, like living rock tossing bits of seaweed and other flotsam. It moves like a restless colt, fidgets against the sand, and Bitterleaf drinks in the sight to the point of nearly forgetting her companions, and even of forgetting the long nights and days behind them. They have been full of event for a simple patrol: a brief brush with an infuriated mother lynx, a bloodied hoof—she trails the drops even now, the scabs broken by the rain and by her own impatient steps—and other things, too. A most unusual filly whom Bitterleaf will wait for now, and another meeting, a necessary but distasteful one, away from the other two, which led to the gravid weight of Bitterleaf’s belly. In days she will deposit the eggs in the drifts of bone-white wood along the shore.

A nearby wave is stained red, pink droplets flung up by the irritated water, and the cause is revealed as Jasper emerges from behind a swell, a massive fish clenched in his jaws and bleeding against the white surf. He barely acknowledges his mother, as though she had never left, and his eyes only briefly linger on her comrades, tracing particularly the line of Crestfallen’s black leg with an expression that comes as near to being skeptical as Jasper’s expression ever comes to being anything.

“We are home,” Bitterleaf says simply, not one for ceremony. In three words she inducts the other two into her world and her family.

Home - just like that.

Crestfallen was home. No word in any tongue could describe the elation, nor could one quell the pressure in her chest. She had made it. The shadows of her legs tread weakly across tangles of seaweed before sinking into the sand - never in her life had Crestfallen seen so much sand. A coarse wind shook her reed-thin frame like a bough upon a tree, so heavy with salt that she nearly faltered beneath the weight of it. It was now she noticed how terribly thin the hunger had had made her. It had hollowed her legs and stolen the roundness from her cheeks and flank. It had made her euphoric in the face of the unknown.

'Magnificent - what a perfect word' thought Crestfallen, gazing upon the buck.

Until that moment she had been quite unaware of him, her attentions keenly - though quietly - focused on the doe. Even with her belly full, the doe was an unyielding spirit. Crestfallen had decided long ago that this stranger called Bitterleaf was, if anything, a sister. And that must have made the buck, red around the maw with the blood of a fresh catch, a brother. And so, too, was Crest. How funny, she thought, before allowing herself to part with several low yet whimsical chuckles. The scarred doe traced the shoreline, eyes bright before a vast and endless ocean. It lurched upon itself and the earth, hissing and twirling like a coil of snakes. All of her dreams seemed to make sense now. And Crest seemed to make sense, too.

She smiled at the buck, reassured. She felt brand new to the world - despite all of her dreams, she had never truly touched the ocean.