It's time to unload.

The girl comes alone, her faithful shadow stubbornly stationed beneath a tree in the World's Edge. More and more the inseparable siblings have found themselves apart- it is part of why she's here, a splotch of copper on a horizon of blue, her hooves marking uneasy furrows in the crumbling clay and sand as waves dance and laugh, unheeding and uncaring for the tumultuous thoughts within her head. Dark eyes narrow; she scowls at the sea, as though it has personally affronted her, as though it is responsible for the guilt she drowns in, the anger she strives so hard to quell. How dare it be happy, when she is so lost. How dare it be full, when she is so empty.

Fire Dancer has few friends, fewer she feels comfortable divulging the full extent of her discontent to- and so instead she seeks out an enemy, a mare she alternately disdains and admires. "Ampere!" the girl's voice cuts through the air, fruitless in the expanse that separates the Throat from the mainland, a distance which has never felt so far to her before. She feels naked beneath the noonday sun, painfully aware of the empty space on her breast where a key once hung, an emblem of belonging she has long since lost. How long has it been since she felt truly at home? Since she held a place she could believe in? Since she was Sun Physician, Oracle... Sultana? The Throat is a fond yet distant memory; she yearns for the hot sand, the warm sun- but it is also another in a long list of failures, and the girl's heart clenches in bittersweet nostalgia as she gazes upon the island she can no longer call her own.

She sighs, and snorts, the thick braid of her forelock falling into her eyes. Fire Dancer feels exposed on the beach, a beacon of weakness in a warm spring day, and yet, for once, she does not care. She is tired - tired of bottling up her anger, tired of trying to be strong, of hopes and fears and loves unspoken, of secrets. Unspoken things are what drove the wedge between her and Natraj, a thousand tiny shards of doubt and resentment piling up util one day she woke up and could not see the other side, could not find him in the cloud she'd wrapped around herself. She must free herself of those blinders, she knows, if she's ever to repair the bonds she's broken- if she's ever to be more than half a soul. She must shed her secrets- and who better to lay them on, than the mare from whom she has hidden the most?

"Ampere!"

- Tandavi -

I'll light a fire in your new shoes - look out that your soles don't burn to the floor