Sleep is impossible when your own skin feels so uncomfortable. My mother had made pregnancy seem so beautiful and easy that I had not thought that I would be eagerly counting down the days until my first child would be born. But then again perhaps it wasn’t all prenatal discomfort; it was partially my choice of habitat. It never would have been my first choice, never in a life time, but a mother’s duty is to protect her child and with that, preserve the family blood line so what choice did I have but wind up here under the protection of the likes of the female she-beast, Shira? After my child’s father took my flower he disappeared like fog in the afternoon sun, leaving me alone but with the pureness of his seed, which is really all I wanted in the end. So now I have a full blooded prince or princess growing with in my womb and despite being stuck in an elevated hell, I suppose it could be worse.

I stared out of the mouth of the cave Shira had shown me the first day I had arrived in this icy wasteland, as my stomach roared loudly begging to be fed. I barely ever left the confines of the rocky cavern, only when hunger seized my guts and forced me to forage did I ever brave the blustering winds of the Peak. They were unpleasant and winter only made them worse, but hunger was undeniable. I sauntered toward the opening, my hooves clicking against the stone floor, reverberating all the way to the back of the cave. I stuck my head out first; my eyes already used to the darkness, surveyed the weather of the evening. The sky was bare, leaving the stars to shine tonight but the chill was imminent. Luckily only a light breeze flitted about the Peak this evening, rather than the roaring squall that screamed about the frozen land most nights, which made foraging the worst possible experience; especially for a desert princess like myself, whose evolution had not prepared her for such extreme low temperatures.

With hesitation, always with hesitation, I emerged from the sanctity of my shelter and allowed my eyes to begin their search for a morsel, a task that was more daunting then one could ever imagine. As I moved farther and farther through the wintery land, my ears picked up on a call that was riding on the winds. I lifted my head, my eyes shifting from where they had been focused on the lightly snow dusted rocks below me, to gaze out across the expanses of the night time scenery. Entwined in the shadows not but a thousand feet from me was a creature dressed in black and with a build that was barely feminine. If her smell had not been lingering on the wintery drafts I would have thought her a stallion by the way she carried herself, bold and yet majestic at the same time; the typical manners of an equine who was not unfamiliar with purity.

But what kind of pure bred could she be? It had taken me by surprise when Shira had informed me of her own pure lineage as I had not expected pureness from sure a large and cumbersome creature as she. It helped me to realize that Arabians from the West were not the only breed to take care of their well-defined heritage and it did my heart good to know that there were other equine that held breeding to be the virtue just as my family had.

With a grace that was complementary to the swollenness of my surely pregnant frame, I moved towards the black lady, hooves dancing over ice and rock with a refinement that came from years of select breeding. I set my skull delicately a top of my fine muscled neck, slightly arched to allude to the beauty that was hidden by the night’s shadows. I stopped before the dark mare as her sturdy frame filled my view and I whickered a quiet greeting with an elegant nod to welcome her to the Peak, my frozen hell.

“Good evening. Welcome to the Peak, home of the Vulcan Mares. My name is Godiva Rhoynar, Princess of the Great Isle in the Western Sea. May ask the name of the lady I am speaking with?”

G O D I V A
Mare - Rose Grey (ee Aa Gg) - Arabian - 3yrs - 15.0
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