He remembers this place.

        The roaring comes back to him first: the noise of a great wind or a sleepless beast, unceasing, from behind the trees. He turned away from it before; he stares in that direction now, with trees casting strange shadows over his flanks and a cold sun bearing down on him. Today, no stranger breaks the trees to catch Caneo’s attention; today, he is alone with the creaky voices of the strange pale birds and the grasping fingers of the breeze.

        The sand reminds him of home, but even so pools softly around his cloven hooves. He ventures forward with long, slow strides; caution wins, every time, against his curiosity – but still he goes. Like a trembling ghost he wavers through the trees, through the shadows, and down onto the open space beyond.

        For a long time, Caneo is still. He stands between the dunes and a writhing expanse of blue, his head up, his huge eyes a perfect complement to the waves. But elsewhere, from his nose to the tip of his tail, a brittle rigidity clings to his muscles – like marble – like ice. He stares for a long time, unblinking, and only the quick, nervous flex of his ribs betrays a single breath drawn in.

        The air tastes bitter here. The sky is bleeding down onto the sand into a pool so big it swallows up the edges of the world. Something about it all strikes the boy as terribly wrong, and the feral trembling of his limbs gives away the instinct to run, run away, be gone from it all. His mind moves in slow, deliberate coils as it tries to swallow the sight.

        He has never seen so much water.

        It feels like a dream – an awful dream – and his head moves with a jerk to bring his cold attention down the sand, the empty sand, where the seabirds play carelessly under a pale sky. No one is coming; no one is here – not close enough to be a threat. Yet. He breathes out a long, shivering breath and his tail writhes as he steps forward and stops, staring again at the waves. Fear crumbles slowly into concern, into wonder, and his long neck snakes out ahead of his narrow body. Blackened nostrils bare pink as he sucks in air again, and it tastes awful, and he thinks the water must be poisoned. His toes dance deliberately in that direction, anyway. He seems unable to leave any corner of the map a mystery; he wants to feel this place out, too, and record it.

        He pauses just above a patch of wet sand where the waves lapped minutes ago. They seem to be receding now; he watches them with pricked ears, tilted head, and eyes more thoughtful than they often seem. “What is this?” Quietly, a question for himself and no one else, a puzzle to turn over in his mind while he waits – for whatever it is Caneo waits for. He is content to watch, now. He has never been a creature of great purpose.