The light was so beautiful, but this place was a sudden stark contrast - for a moment, Beauty Past Compare regretted her decision, for the rolling dunes and glittering sand were far more appealing, and the dank emptiness of the current environment was distasteful to her. The queerness of her sight slipping away from her will irritated her, and she was rather distressed and annoyed as she pantomimed her walk, her breaking run, her desperation for release from this empty, ugly desolation. And Beauty hated to run. It was so terribly uncomfortable.
When the tall silhouette, then the darkness overcame her - she woke. When she found her hooves pushing against the swamp's mud and her head rather undignifiedly resting on dirt, she rose, brushed herself off, and stumbled into a rather more comfortable patch of short brush to rest. It was good to be home.
Am I asleep, or am I awake? She demanded of nothing and everything around her as she found herself seated in the swamp, near to the join of the plains, and tall, sweeping sand just beyond a long stretch of grass. She had had her fill of adventuring for a while, and the sight was frustrating. If it had been this conveniently close, perhaps she would have walked home again instead of struggling through - struggling through something quite blurry now, but distinctly uncomfortable.
Yet, as the sand swept across the desert, and swept down, its grains flitting past the grassy blades, she heard a song carried with the sand.
Beauty Past Compare knew many songs. When she'd found her calling as a child, she sought them all out. The songs that told stories and legends, the songs that revered the Motherfather, songs that travelled from beyond the swamp into the land as the Ache carried them in. She knew so many that they melded in her head, and at any point of time, they would resurface. She sang snatches of song as she came through the brush, she sang as she waded through the swamp. She adapted her own signature aria, from a grand story she would like to tell someday. But before that, she longed to know - what was this song?
She sat there patiently, though it was difficult for her pride. She usually knew them from the first note, but the first note had given her no knowledge, just the mere feeling of comfort, contentment, and a wisp of joy. Perhaps if she heard more, she would know.
As the wind and the sand whistled past, and the grass swayed, it came to her.
It was a classic Acha choral ode. She first heard it in her research, said to be passed down generations simply because they sang it together, in the legendary nights of Acha carousing in the desert. It was an ode to love, to joy, to passion, to the desert and everything that the classic Acha stood for. It was rousing and uplifting - it sang of what being an Acha meant, and what being an Acha was.
It flowed down the desert, down the plains, into the swamp. It was then that Beauty understood that she was right to have gone, and the week of slogging through sand, and heat, and trouble, and obnoxious kin was the right thing to do. And she thanked the Motherfather for blessing her with the task, and thanked the desert for blessing her with their song.
When she woke again, hooves firmly planted in the mud of the swamp, the same song emanated through the area, courtesy of one fat, singing Acha.