The howls of the wolves reverberated in her bones and sent ripples of unease racing down her spine. It was agonizing to wait patiently with the rest of the Bay's herd while the canines ran wild through the Cove, but Kohelet knew she had nothing to offer to her birth family. Not only was she so heavily with child that she could barely move, but she had never been particularly violent to begin with. At best, she would provide a distraction that might lead them away from her younger siblings in the Cove, and at worst, she might become their meal.

The thought made her shiver, but as the sensation reached her flanks it shifted into something different, something strange and the painted mare stiffened in surprise to glare at the heft of her belly in suspicion. In truth, so much of pregnancy had been foreign to her that she didn't immediately recognize the onset of labor for what it was. She'd spent months being poked and prodded and kicked from the inside that her initial suspicion was that her child had simply found a new nerve to dig at. The first time Kohelet had lost feeling in her hindquarters due to the foal's position had terrified her, but now she knew that she needed only to nip at her own skin to move the child into a different, less painful spot.

She had spent the later part of the afternoon lounging in the deeper pockets of the hotsprings to soothe the strange cramping in her belly. It had started happening off and on some weeks ago, and had utterly terrified her at first. She'd feared that she would give birth at any minute, but as the cramping persisted, she had slowly but steadily grown used to it. She wasn't sure why motherhood had to add extra cramping on top of the hundreds of other miserable things about it, but she was honestly pretty confused about most of the changes that had happened to her body over the past few months.

This time, however, the cramping intensified and shifted deeper, gripping at the sides of her flanks and making her grunt in surprise. Instinct demanded that she step away from the herd, even though she knew that her duty lay with them, and it was with heavy steps that she compromised by hiding just out of sight from them to pace restlessly as her labor progressed. She hoped that she could hold off long enough for Fell to return, but as the contractions intensified, she began to fear that she would have to give birth with a chorus of wolf howls as background music.

Instinct demanded that she abandon the herd to seek out the place she'd chosen to deliver her child, but duty kept her from wandering too far away from the herd. Even in her darkest fears prior to today, when she imagined her birth she had never considered that the safety of the herd would be compromised a the same time.

She dared not call out for Fell lest it distract him from his hunt or draw the wolves to her, and so she fretted silently, frantically debating between her options. Her patchwork coat became grayish as sweat dampened her body from her pacing, and it was all she could do to keep herself together. Eventually, Kohelet realized she could not put it off any longer. She could feel that she was past the point of delay, and so with a strained command to the herd to watch out for each other, she turned to hustle toward her chosen foaling place.

By the time she reached the small clearing she had selected, she was panting with the effort and had to catch her breath before collapsing on the small bed of early sprouting ferns she'd ever so carefully uncovered and cultivated over the past two weeks. The moment she was prone, her body removed the numbing layer of adrenaline it had used to insulate her during her fearful contemplation. A low scream whistled out from between her clenched teeth as a contraction seized her body, and as she groggily resurfaced at the other end of it mentally, she couldn't suppress the low, guttural call for Fell that escaped her.