Pain roused the young mare from her slumber, jolting her consciousness from the bliss of rare peace into the chaos of labor. Having struggled to sleep or eat or drink through the entire pregnancy, Ivanna was a shadow of her former self, but happier than she could ever remember being. She'd been reduced to a grossly swollen bag of bones, her spine protruding plainly like a craggy spine of mountain peaks, presiding over the fecund swell of her stomach.

And yet still, with the pale figure of Verrat beneath her pillowed head, she smiled. She smiled because this was their new beginning, the moment they'd spent months and months and months waiting for. It was painful to be sure, she wouldn't deny that. The process was little more than a blur, and by all accounts fast compared to the others that Ivanna would never see. She could watch each contraction ripple across her own stomach, but she did so without attachment. It was growing harder, as the labor progressed, to concentrate on much, let alone how alien it all seemed.

By the time the filly lay in a wet and muddled heap at Ivanna's rear limbs, coated in a thin veneer of her mother's red arterial blood, Ivanna can barely muster the strength to raise her blazed face to look back at the wriggling child. Even as it's furtive movements jostle against her hocks, she finds that she can barely feel her limbs enough to try and drag them a scant inch away from her.

"Is she here?" She asks weakly of her lover, trying her best to focus on the baby; she'd known it was a girl halfway through the pregnancy. Not for sure, of course, but Ivanna had felt a connection with the tiny little soul she harbored and had known with her heart that her baby was a girl. The blood that continues to spill out of her does not register in her eyes in the slightest, even as it forms a small reddish lake on the soil just beneath the wriggling foal. "She's so… beautiful," Ivanna murmurs, even as she lays her head back on the cold earth with the intention of simply closing her eyes for a moment. Just long enough that she might be able to gather her thoughts and wake back up. Except she can't. Closing her eyes just makes the weariness that plagues her more distinct.

Ivanna