No matter how valiantly she wished and prayed, pleaded and begged and sold her soul, the fiery pits did not unearth the soul she searched for. It hurt that she could still remember him with such clarity. His soft curling smile, boyish and charming, unsure of himself in endearing ways but with a playful coyness that had captured her attention. His soft eyes, calm and unmoving, like bedrock. He had been her first stable, reliable friend. Regardless of how she feared she may feel for him, Muriel would always cherish him foremost as the man who had given her another reason to live. All she wanted was to see him one more time. Tell him about the son they had together, make sure he was okay, that he was even alive...but Muriel wouldn't allow herself to think of that. He had to be alive. He had to. And maybe in the very end she could tell him that, impossibly, perhaps, she had begun to feel something for him.

The rising sun was her only answer. It played light on her pale flanks, added to the sweat already glistening on her lean frame. It was unbearably hot but she never so much as twitched a single muscle in contemplation of departing. Her rosen hide remained as still and calm as blown glass, delicate but beautiful and coveted nonetheless. Muriel could be stubborn, and though she was a lost and faithless sinner undeserving of fruition for her pleas, she still mulishly hoped that her fervent desires alone would will Gull into existence. Whether she deserved that was another thing she did not desire to dwell upon. She had already been given Brigand and Leliel. Oh but she was a selfish and greedy soul, and her heart longed for those few missing pieces still dedicatedly stuck on the stallion who ever eluded her.

Maybe the future was foreseen by the Gods, who took pity on the valiant mare with the kind heart and feeble will. Perhaps it was for Brigand, who would need a protector, a parent to love and console him when her time ran out. Or maybe it was for Gull, to either punish or reward him, to give her back to him only to rip her away irreversibly. Muriel was unaware of her fate, her pending demise, and instead she heard salvation in the disbelieving utterance of her name. As if stuck in a realm of slowed, half-hearted time, she turned and let her wide, blown eyes fall upon him. His name slipped out of her lips on a prayerful gasp, a sigh of impossibilities rolled into one. A chance meeting that undermined all her long seasons of searching for him. "Gull..." and then as he began to move for her, a hysterical delight overtook her.

Her name had never sounded more beautiful, and she laughed aloud in a heady rush of gratitude and love and disbelief and a thousand other emotions that collided one another and exploded into fragmented stardust shards inside her buzzing head. Her wings flared toto e her balance and she turned to find him, not daring to so much as blink lest his mirage disappear. It would crush her to lose him so brutally, a figment of her desperate, lonely imagination. "GULL!" she cried in jubilant response, flying more than running with how light her hooves - her entire body and soul - felt. She was floating, and he was her rock, holding her down to earth right when she'd thought she'd never come back down.

They came together like reversed magnets, their polarities compatible, sucking them back together with an almost violent sort of euphoria. Muriel barely heard his gasped words of disbelief, saw only his searching gaze, the clear desire to touch and be touched. Be assured this was real. So Muriel threw her foremost wings towards him, hoping to clasp round his barrel, slip to interlock their primaries and ruck up their feathers together. She wanted to be part of him intrinsically, wanted to sew him into her flesh and never let him leave her side again. A morbid sort of sorry dedication. And she was laughing to the heavens even as tears poured down her face because he was alive! And it was all she had ever wanted. At last she'd been called home, her compass completed, heart returned to fullness. She sought his muzzle with her own, wanting to breathe in the scent that she would so often awake to in half-slumber, searching in vain for him as her sleep-addled mind swore hollow promises that he was there, just as he had been in her dreams. A ghost of a scent, a touch, that she'd chase into awareness only to cry herself back to sleep when he was not there beside her, completing her ragtag little family. Muriel had never owned anything in her life but that little group. Maybe she could finally complete it.

"I'm alive," was all she could think to say through her tears, laughing and hiccuping, overwhelmed with her gratitude and relief. "You're here." To anyone else it would sound like the most sincere prayer, with how it rolled off her tongue. As if there was no greater gift possible in the world.