A figure rose with the massive waves, carrying himself with a dogged weakness out of the sea that threatened to swallow it all. It was Arem, the paleness of his figure lost among the silver shafts of rain that pounded from the dark, dark sky. He was gasping, sputtering, coughing out salt and water, every inch of him soaked and dripping. The storm had ripped him from his home and carried him down here. He had never believed much in gods. Oddly enough, that gave him comfort right now -- he was here under his own power, and brought by a storm that was its own power. No curses and no blessings. He thought for a moment of Ciara's yearling foals -- he had been with them when all of the sudden the world had been torn to pieces. He had told them to stay close and to stay together, and suddenly the island had been eaten, and they and he eaten with it. He sighed and looked up into the storm, the droplets falling like shedding pine needles in the gold eye he could open. OK, maybe he would take some blessings -- for his people, but not him.

Arem tried in vain to shake the salt from his mane. His body was battered and bruised already, his left eye swolen shut, and the storm whipped around him wildly, tearing at his shaggy silver mane and pulling at his ruff, sending it wheeling around him like the skirt of a dervish. He lowered his head against the rain, and his sky-dark hooves sought some purchase on the soaked grey sand. They dug in desperate and they dug in deep, nearly buriyng him to his ankles. In the rain, he looked even smaller than he was -- bowed and hunched, struggling against everything, his own self included, he finally looked as he always really had looked, and had tricked the world, for a while, to not see; he looked like a colt half-formed, pushed into the world too early; he looked like someone who had starved and could not hold onto what he could find to fill himself with, and had managed only the illusion of having enough; He looked like Arem Taintblood.

There was no thunder -- or, at least, no sound of thunder. There wasn't even the sound of his own hooves scraping on the sand, his desperate hacking under his breath: there was nothing but the wind and the sea forever. But still, no thunder. That meant all he wanted was a tree. Just a tree, just a tree that would not snap before the wind, just some place to curl and rest, to wait out the storm that was freezing his bones. He didn't pray, but he did chant names in the back of his mind. Two of them wouldn't surprise. Maybe one of them would, and then again maybe her name wouldn't.

((this thread is reserved for Disaster, if she chooses it to be. She just takes a while))