Cirrus the WindDancer

It wasn't the first time Cirrus' nightmares had come to life. When her father died, she would dream of the only thing left to her being taken from her - Sitka. She remembered the fitful sleeps, the vivid dreams - and the soul-crushing reality of when her nightmare came to life. The wrenching, shattered, hollow feeling had been with her ever since.

Any scrap of hope left within her sunk into the darkest depths of despair as the earth tremored below, the voice that followed reduced the mare to nothing more than a shivering, broken pile of feathers. As it was, as the Earth lord's voice boomed louder and louder around her, echoing, repeating the question she asked herself. She could feel the storm he summoned with his disappointment, it rolled across her hide, a bitter and difficult pill for her to swallow - and yet one she expected. For what else had Cirrus ever brought, but disappointment?

The cloudmare cowered before the Earth God, holding her head low to peek through slitted eyelids up at him. He was so huge, a towering thunderhead, a stormfront, and she was barely a raindrop amongst billions, falling lower and lower beneath him. Though the Earth God's storm was already dissipating, Cirrus felt the clouds shift further as her own magic reacted to the simple, sudden blast of emotions that roiled and toiled within her.

The clouds above churned and grew dark, and her pelt copied. A rainshower brewed, fat drops making the clouds look pregnant and heavy above, before they eventually fell from the sky, just as Cirrus bowed her head to the loaded question the Earth God gave her, and wept out her answer.

"I never… I'm not.. It was my father who wanted me to be a healer. I never.." she didn't know what she was saying - she didn't know why the Earth God had tasked her with something, under some assumption, some guess that she wanted to be a healer again - did he see something in her she could not? No, she thought with despair, for I have failed even him, I have proven that I am unworthy, that I am nothing, nothing but a killer.

I am nothing but a harbinger of death.

"They all drank, they all.. they wanted to.. but I wanted to .. but I couldn't.." The rain thickened, sheets of heavy droplets pelted down to the earth, and the rainmare shivered beneath it.

Then suddenly, the rain stopped.

Clouds still churned above and upon her coat, but everything else was eerily still.

Cirrus was a warrior, a soldier - she was broken, her soul fractured and shattered, poorly pieced back together for time, but now… now there was nothing left of her. Cirrus had heard that she needed to collect tokens from corpses purified in water, and so that was what she did, the only way she knew how. She was a broken soul, a half-being - could a God even fix that?

In one smooth motion, Cirrus was holding the spear again. In another motion, she was swinging its sharp, pointed tip towards her breast - she wanted to end it all, she was done, done with living this failure of a life…