"Water..."
Viv woke to the rocking of the boat, and the pain of her throat, rough as though she'd been eating sand. Her lips cracked and bled, stinging with the thin salt spray that covered everything.
The rocking of the boat was erratic, unfamiliar to her, and she groaned as she tried to cover her body a little more with her cloak, shielding herself from the beating sun.
Unable to seek land or rely on any signal besides the rising sun in the mornings, Viv had resigned herself to going wherever the flow of the sea would take her. She paddled towards the sun in the mornings, and away from it in the evenings, but she knew it was futile. She could be within a dozen pony lengths of an island and not know it. In the last few hours, the boat had taken to lurching side to side in an odd way, rather than rocking. She wondered if it was falling apart or if she was cross to the waves.
A long high bird call shook her out of her misery, and she turned her head towards it, trying to hear anything more, any hint of where the bird was.
Another odd shove on the boat almost sent her stumbling off of it, clinging to the high side until it rested again. She felt dizzy, confused by the motion and by the toll taken by her body in this journey. Then another bird cry from only inches away scared her into flinging herself off the boat entirely, and onto wet sand. Blessed solid ground.
With a gleeful laugh, Viv spread her magic out from her body, up the side of the boat, and quickly grabbing the seagull and yanking it closer.
"Better than saltwater," She growled in a half-whisper, before killing the animal and drinking its blood.
That moment was not made of decision and thought, but rather some brutal animalistic desire. She’d lost so much of herself, that Viv did not exist as much as a starved and thoughtless equine that would do anything.
Once Viv finished her grisly meal, she had to lay on the sand for quite a while, fighting her stomach. Not only had she just eaten meat for the first time, but she'd taken a life on purpose, for her own survival. It was nauseating, it gripped every part of her body and twisted it. Her mind was struck with turmoil, her muscles tensed and spasmed, her stomach heaved, but she fought to keep it down.
In that horrible moment, Viv realized that this defined her. The will to live. She would do anything to live. That was the only thought she could cling to in the storm raging through her. The will and self strength that kept her from dying in this moment was her only redeeming facet, and the only thing she could trust.
After what seemed like hours, the air around her became cool. The tide had receded, leaving her dry.
Viv stood, coughing and then fighting the gag that came at the taste.
Slowly, she began walking away from the water. A thin line of her magic combed the ground in front of her, as her head hung so low she might catch her lip on a stray stone. She had no energy left to do anything but to live, and strive to keep going.
The beach turned to a plain, and then into a forest. After the sun had gone down completely and the cool air became frosty on her raw skin, Viv found a small trickling stream. She wondered briefly if she would have been able to make it this far without the nourishment from the seagull, but the question was quickly dismissed. It wouldn't help her to be self pitying.
The water was brackish, and tasted like there might be something untoward within, but it was enough nourishment for her to stagger on as the night grew steadily colder and her legs began to tremble.
But with her thin magic sense guiding her around trees, she continued to stumble through the trees.
When she finally found a small overhang to curl up in, she was so exhausted that she didn't even dream.
Viv woke abruptly, crying.
Alone, utterly. Without using her magic, she could almost imagine she'd fallen asleep in her garden in Bitain, she could imagine that the smell of tea leaves surrounded her, not moldering underbrush and wet rotten dirt. But even there, she'd been alone. Even in her home, she'd been isolated from the world, not because of her blindness, but because the ponies all around her had no desire to care about her, or know her.
Certainly it did not help that she shunned them at every opportunity, that she could imagine them as nothing else but the ponies that had allowed her to be abandoned in a church of the stars, and raised as the cripple of the town. They were all worthless, and she’d never forgiven them.
"Damn them all. Damn them all to the fires of Tartarus, and to the same darkness I make my home," she whispered as she tried to clear the tears from her eyes, and stand.
The sounds of the forest around her made it clear that she'd found herself in some sort of wilderness far from civilization that would have taught the birds to be scared of ponies, who had hunted them for feathers for hundreds of years. She would need to survive on her own. As she took her first step back into the forest, she felt the hair of her coat on her chest remain taut, and grimaced as she realized that she must have had blood or some other substance stiffening her coat.
With new determination, she lit her magic in a full circle around her, and began walking. Thanks to some rudimentary knowledge of berries, she was able to find a small snack before the sun rose highest in the sky. They were bitter little things, but they tasted better than Viv's last meal.
She then lucked across a small stream. Equally thin as the previous one, she followed it until she found a pool that she could step into after drinking, and clean the saltwater and blood from her coat.
Feeling thoroughly pathetic, and laying the sopping wet cloak across her back to dry in the warm sunlight, Viv had to wonder what to do next. Staying in this spot seemed like giving up, like she was admitting defeat. But continuing onwards seemed too risky.
Despite wanting desperately to move on, to find the comforts of civilization again, Viv realized that she could walk off into a desert, and not find water again for days. She'd stumbled across this pond, the chances of finding another easily wouldn't be worth the risk.
With a sigh, and resigning herself to the difficulty of survival ahead, she laid down next to the pond. Drinking slowly so she would not risk upsetting her stomach further, she rested. Every once in a while she would reach out with her magic, exploring her surroundings. She could sense the trees, bushes, some large stones, nothing that stood out as urgent, until a rabbit hopped through her magical glow. She hesitated, but let it go.
"There must be another way," she whispered, shaking her head as she banished thoughts of meat.
Probing further with her magic, Viv found some sprouting greens that seemed like she might be able to eat them, and some mushrooms. Hoping that they weren't poisonous, she rose from her spot next to the pool, and began ripping up plants. Many of them turned to mush under her magic or tasted sour, but she found a strain of grass that tasted alright, along with some roots that she thought might be wild onions or something, by the layered structure and eye watering aroma.
It was enough for her to feel like she could focus on shelter, with her belly digesting something more agreeable.
Without a cave or overhang nearby, she found that she could fit between the two largest rocks in the area, making it a nice little shelter, if she covered it. It was a tight little hiding spot, just enough room for her to lay down, if she was okay with using a rock as a pillow, which she couldn’t really argue against considering the situation and the distinct lack of linen with which to make pillows. Besides, she was trying to kill fewer living things, not more, and it would take a lot of birds to fill a pillow.
Viv smiled a little at the idea of just catching that many birds to pluck them, and having an army of angry naked birds following her around to do her bidding. She then sighed and got to work.
With a few minutes of effort, she'd laid enough sticks across the two, that she could lay her cloak on top to make a shelter. Several times she accidentally knocked sticks down when she tried to examine the arrangement with her magic, and accidentally applied a push in the wrong direction.
But once the cloak was laid across and weighed down with a few stones, the roof of her shelter seemed sturdy enough.
She had another small meal of grass, before laying down and resting.
It was almost painful to have a moment of comfort and peace. The sea had been a constant state of discomfort, trying to use as little effort as possible, knowing it was only a matter of time until she died. But now she was surviving. Death was not a foregone conclusion.
So what would she do with her life, now that she could lay claim to it again? It was an unanswerable question.
She lowered her horn to the ground, and let the magic spread. It crawled across the rocky ground, then down until she felt it grow weak, and dissipate into a cloud. The water, a cool space that she couldn't quite touch, couldn't define. She could form a cup with her magic, lift water with it. But she couldn't actually touch and perceive it in the same way she could with solid objects.
Using her magic, she stirred up some sediment, and the water became a little more defined. But she still couldn't touch it.
She sighed, and let her magic fade. Her head throbbed a little from straining to make her magic do something it was incapable of.
Tired, alone, and without a path ahead. Viv stood and walked back to her little shelter on memory, without using her magic. She curled up against the cold stone, and relaxed her body, muscle by muscle, until she could finally sleep.
Thankfully, the night didn't bring wind. The shelter didn’t protect her from the cold, but as Viv began to wake up, she heard thin sheets of rain rolling through the trees. She stayed in her shelter, resting, as the sounds rolled over her. The roof held, though she had to shift slightly to keep her tail dry.
The rain calmed her. Her head stopped hurting, and she sang softly to herself to pass the time. She sang the men’s part of a religious hymn. Growing up in a Church of Sol had given her few comforts, but the rich tones of the songs they sung, were a comfort as much as a warm blanket. Her voice may not go quite as low as the stallions, but she felt her part in those words, her role as she sang of tilling fields below the warmth of the sun, and of the long summer days that gave rise to communities coming together. It was a sort of dream of wonder and acceptance that she’d never had. Something to hope for.
Some warmth to get her through the darkness that she had made her home.
It wasn't much, the home that Viv made for herself over the next few days. It was cold, as she didn't know how to start a fire, and she ate meagerly, mostly from wild grasses and roots that she could wash clean. But as she regained her strength, she realized that despite telling herself that it was better this way, she was terribly alone in the forest, and staying so isolated would only serve to make her more miserable.
So she ranged further from camp, exploring the area and gathering as much food as she could, until she found a thin trail, a beaten path winding through the trees.