The roar and rush of the ocean was comforting and sounded old to her ears. It crashed over the sound of anything else, and it soothed her. The ocean was something that always changed, and that did not bother her as much as she thought it would. When she had been told that the waters spilled out across a majority of the globe and was able to conquer continents, islands, and drown volcanoes, she had not been as afraid of the waters as she ought to have been. While the sea did not harbour the sort of water that was drinkable or even safe to traverse, it was blue and it was beautiful, alluring and tempting all at the same time.

Though all Liit had to do was listen to the ocean sing. On sunny days, the gulls cried sharply overhead, their screams cutting through the sound of the surf, but never loud enough to be deafening or harmful. They were another part of the chorus of the sea, and Liit rather enjoyed being able to hear it. Where she had been born, there had been nothing but fields and forests had been sparse and far in between. Yet when she had first glimpsed the ocean, she had been taken by its unpredictability and it’s constantly changing ways.

So when she heard the sounds of crashing waves, she was drawn to the edge of the land, forced to stand on the shore and watch as the water frothed at her ankles. For the first time in a while, she felt rather at east, standing at the edge of the known earth (how was she to know what lay on the other side of the ocean?) with nothing but the whole of Helovia behind her. Closing her eyes, she breathes in softly, tasting the salt in the air and listening to the cries of the gulls overhead that are soaring into the distance. As the water rushes up to meet her hooves, she inches forwards, letting her hooves sink into the wet sand as her eyes open slowly to watch the tide rise up to meet her.

It had taken her almost a month to get clean and clear from her family. She had managed to disappear into the forests that surrounded the field in which she was born and raised, and on the other side of the forest, after she had been running for weeks straight, she had found the sea. That first time she had seen the water had offered her salvation and freedom, and into it she had slipped. With that memory, one that clearly belonged to her and was not a part of someone’s twisted stories and lies, she wades knee deep into the water and dips her head to bring her lips closer to the surface and breathes deep.