Perhaps the sensation of absence woke me. I cannot be certain; I hardly believe my heart could grow so sentimental as to drag my mind from sleep the moment the girl slipped off. Regardless I did stir, graceless as a child pulled from nightmare, my lungs sucking at the air as if I had forgotten how to breathe. Blinking, I stared at the lean silhouettes of unfamiliar trees. The remnants of some newly forgotten dream slithered off, retreating to the corners of my mind. It would return. They always did.

      Night clung to the World’s Edge like a shroud. It obscured the narrow press of the forest but not the distant crash of waves – bitter reminders that I dwelled now beyond my comfort. The young forest would never be home. The child, when I eventually discovered her missing, was still not my own.

      I hardly begrudged her that, but my ears tilted down as I scanned the darkness for her winged shape. Running off had become a bad habit of hers... If only the young managed to understand what dangers the world posed to them. With a grunt, I shook off the last vestiges of sleep and straightened up. Though my thoughts entertained momentarily the idea of simply forgetting, and returning again to sleep, an old guilt prickled at my mind – the long-decaying carcass of a different disaster. That particular wound lay buried too deep to reopen again, but it drove me forward. I owed the girl some measure of circumspection – for both our sakes.

      The incessant tossing of the ocean only increased. It foamed and snarled far below, as if writhing in jealousy. I sneered back at the noise, my tail twisting. Surely Faeanne wasn’t clumsy enough to go toppling over the cliff’s edge? She had wings, didn’t she? I thought about it, and wondered if perhaps she’d yet to figure out their use. Or perhaps she was simply too young? I had not examined them to any extent, pulled too far in other directions by convergent emotions. My heart had ever sworn to be my own undoing.

      Eventually, the sound of her young voice carried over the sea, anyway: light and fine, undamaged by distress. Who the hell saw fit to entertain foals in the middle of the night? My tail lashed again, and head up, I quickened my pace. Not out of concern – hardly – unless it was concern for my own right to sleep peacefully at night. “Faeanne!” I remembered too late I could use my voice to locate thinking individuals. Soon afterward, I stumbled nearly over the top of her, and stopping short, only refrained from landing on my own face by some grace of instinct pulling my haunches low and under me.

      My head snapped up, and annoyed, I stared at both the child and the stallion accompanying her. He, of course, received the brunt of my ill humor: a long, irritated look, silent as my lungs rattled to catch up with my body’s movement. They became, with age, ever more useless. “Faeanne,” I snapped again, when I could. I directed the firmest I look I possessed upon her. In the area of grim and angry, at least, I was a practiced expert. “What are you doing wandering about in the middle of the night?” The next glare I reserved for the stallion, contemptuous. “Who the hell are you?”