Water was always a scarcity, back home. A treasure, a resource to be hoarded. Much blood was spilt over it.

And good god, she's never seen so much of the stuff her life. Blue, endless blue, stretching as far as the eye can see. Gaping, swallowing the sky in its mouth.

She creeps closer, ever a cautious beast, and swears the water breathes back. Some living, thinking creature. It reaches for her, washes over her feet with such quick fierceness that she recoils with a yelp and retreats toward the rocks. It does not follow far. She watches, then, from a distance, with narrowed eyes and curled lip. Settles only when she is certain it will not come for her again.

The rain starts soon after, and she tilts her face to the sky with parted jaws. A ritual older than she, passed from mother to child. Where the gaping ocean reeks of salt and brine, this tastes just how she remembers. Cold, fresh, soothing on the tongue. She drinks her fill, allows rainfall to clean old wounds— and is interrupted in her bathing by the sharp crack of teeth splitting bone. Wolf, maybe.

Or something bigger.

She turns, slow, and is met with a towering behemoth of bone-white. Bladed teeth rival swords in their might, gnashing with ease at sinew and viscera. And Häti finds, in this moment, that she is more hungry, more intrigued than afraid. Belly fur sweeps gravel as the coyote crawls forward, keeping to the beast's hindquarters. If she is lucky, it will be far too distracted by its own hunger to notice her. And if she is not...

Well, she can run fast.