Dragoncrest Cliffs i'm not crying. you're not crying, are you?

Well, this was it. This what what the fates had in store from her. There was no ultimate lesson to be learned from her family’s leaving — no retribution she must suffer. There was no possible  bargaining or reckoning she could do to earn her family back. No, if there had been, then Isleña certainly would have found it. She searched for that hard, and that long. But, in the end, there was only pointless pain and frayed, severed ties where there should have been cleanly cleaved cuts. 

Isleña didn’t deserve this, and she might feel like nothing without the company of her Luks, but the banshee was not a quitter. She might wrestle and shriek against the confines of her new realities, but she always eventually learned to accept them and move forward with head held high. That’s what must happen now. She was never a queen, and might never one day be a queen, but at least she could have the dignity of one.

Isleña found herself in a foreign land, where she was the outsider. The woman did not speak their language — either of them, for she ascertained there was a different, more guttural language being used here too — and she did not know their lands or their customs. She was the newcomer that she had always hated amongst Khorasan; the ones who did not assimilate and could not find their way. They were burdens; and right now, Isleña was definitely a burden. She hated it, but she did not show it.

At least, if anything, these wolves reminded her of home. The location was vastly different, but the energy was the same. Fighters who took no one’s shit — that, Isleña easily understood with no words needed. Strength emanated from this group just as weakness sometimes emanated from others. If her life with the Luks must be over,  then it was this crowd that Isleña could easily picture herself assimilating with. Eventually. It would take her some time, but Isleña was the first person to cut herself some slack. Hopefully these wolves — dradego? or something — would do the same of her.

It was all these things, and more, that Isleña pondered as she picked across the innards of the territory, looking like an interloper and feeling very much the same.