CHERNOBYL

It's been such a long while since Chernobyl has been anywhere but in the vast open white of the tundras and their pinnacle spires of stone and ice. Today though, she has abruptly decided to venture elsewhere. She sets off. She moves southward and the air loses it's bite and the gusts lull to a soft chilly breeze when she reaches the end of the ice-bridge that connects the north with the rest of Helovia. She stops along the way to observe random oddities - something is in the air and it is not just Frostfall. She does not catalogue anything in particular, but the air's vibrations were certainly off. Her dark eyes tilt up to the cloudless dawn sky...what are those fuckers up to?

She travels for hours, moving now toward the coast at a calm old-lady walk. Her tail dreads slash across her snow spackled hips and legs. There are no bugs, it is just a habit of hers. She thinks and thinks, and thinks some more. Some of it random and some of it not so random - like the parts including Murdock. What ever happened to her lover? The last she had seen him was when they met in front of the caves under a pregnant moon.It is just the black mare's luck to have him go missing as soon as she was really starting to think of him as a permanant fixture amongst her mostly solitary days (not that she dislikes the solitude, because she loves it).

The morning sky is bright and steady as it crests over the hills and dips and forest's close quartered brambles. The sun is glowing orange this morning, slipping through the trunks of the old oaks to touch the path she walks over. The trail has become muck, ice and snow with the occasional root jutting up out of the flattened earth...just to make sure each and every traveller is paying attention.

Finally she reaches the edge of land where it sharply turns to jagged slate rock and fierce rolling waves. Her solid toes hit the snow-less sands (the wind must keep it at bay), her neck delivers her nose to press against the ground for smells and signs of others. There is none. No one gives a shit about the beach when the air is so frigid and the atmosphere full of unforgiving snows. Chernobyl is different though, as most who've met her well know. She likes the dank, dark, grey, dreary loneliness of an empty beach. Something about it's depressing condition soothes her weird cracked heart. She steps up to the cold waves, letting the foam caress the crimped tendrils spilling from her ankles. She moves on down the barren sands toward where the rocks gather around a small lagoon. Perhaps someone or something interesting is hiding over there. Perhaps nothing at all. She follows an odd twinge of curiosity bubbling in her brain, trotting across the thin glassy layer of ocean water that reaches the furthest. The sound of crashing waves draws her to a canter, chunks of beach and water flinging in her wake. Her broad, black chest, her stout legs, under-belly and tail are all covered now in the torn salty granules that scar beneath her quickening pace.

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