[AW] with or without sun we'll grow

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The air was thick with moisture following the brief storm, and milky mist now lapped sedately at the trunks of the trees, the haze glowing gold in the light of high noon.  Brittle crumbs of spring hail crunched beneath her hooves, but Nymphidia's passage through the forest was otherwise silent.  She had drifted through shaded woodland for hours, and had long since grown accustomed to the trill of birds, and the sigh of leaves combed by the wind.  A foreign sound however caused the quiet steps to pause, a foreleg suspended with delicate ankle still crooked to fall, and her ears quivered as her senses strained into the depths of the forest.  

Drip, drip, drip.  It was not the sound of water itself that piqued her curiosity, but rather the sound created by the item that each noisy droplet struck.  The intricate mechanisms of her inner ear suggested that the noise was water falling upon a stone item of some height.  Perhaps it would be a small, hidden overhang of stone under which she could rest.  With hopes of finding someplace cool and hidden to lay her head, Nymphidia swerved toward the sound. 

She came upon a crude, stony shrine, perhaps erected in times long ago to appease the good mother, or some spirit of the forest.  The stone towered upright nearly three times taller than she, and though it had long since been overgrown by emerald moss and golden lichens, she could faintly see strange shapes deliberately etched into the stone.  Drip. Drip.  The canopy gradually shrugged leftover rain and hail from it's leaves, scattering water onto the pinnacle of the rock, where it then exploded into a fine mist. Though not what she had hoped for, it would certainly suffice.  

First the keel of her breast dipped, then hips followed to lower to the soil, and she reclined in the shadow of the monument.   Her magic flourished into the air from nothingness, arcing in a dome to repel the spray misting the air from above.  The dame had traveled so very far from where she wintered in the herds of her daughters, a moments rest was blessing enough from the shrine.

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She sought the humid heat of territory saturated with water.  Her head ached today.  From the moment her slender ears acknowledged the morning bird song, her sinuses throbbed with savagery.  Any turn nearly made her sick.  Light was miserable.  She traveled by hoof, her vertigo too unpredictble to trust with flight.  Sake held no true destination in mind either.  Just warmth, and water.  Perhaps distance herself from the pollen floating in the air.  Her entire skull was encircled with pressure.  

Head hung low to assist in her tender steps across the glades.  She snuffed and nibbled at sprouts of cat-tail and wild onion, hoping nourishment would ease the twist in her abdomen.  Muscles clenched tighter in response.  Sake sighed, lapping some silt water, and continued into the mire.

There was a concern nagging her.  An unasked question, a question she was afraid to think.  Instead her mind skirted around this plausible reality, tormenting her instead with the sight of dark Fen.  Her elder brother did not possess her melanistic deficiency, yet his pelt maintained the sable defined by their father.  A beautifully deep brown, the richest mud during the wet season.  Copper ore eyes, staring at her, in heat, in disapproval, in aghast misery.

Sake shook her pelt as if to free herself from rain and instantly regretted the decision.  Her breakfast followed with a few harsh wretches into water and grass.  Sake moaned and swayed for a moment, before her vision managed to create definition despite the glare of sun.  She needed shelter.  Someplace to lay, and nurture her headache.  Repositioning her resting wings, the doe altered her direction towards a collection of massive cyprus, spying numerous odd shapes in the emerald shadows.  Stone formations. Sake whimpered a bit of relief, her steps increasing to a sluggish trot.