Common

(content warning for child death, suicidal ideation, some body horror, and extreme violence)

Six seasons have passed since Vitani's whole world fell apart, and she remembers it like yesterday.

How could she not? It haunts her - awake, asleep, in the grey-washed liminal space between them where she now spends most of her hours, it lingers. Brighter than Zira's golden image, darker than the look in Raegar's eyes as he'd once pushed her back to Salem, the memory obscures everything else, swallowing it whole, leaving nothing but emptiness and the yawning void of her own despair.

She had been in the Bay, back from her brief stint in the Badlands and swollen with Fell's child. Her labor pains had started - but they were too fast, too quick, and there was so much blood, too much blood. Something was wrong. She wasn't herself, she was sick, and weak, and then something tried to take her newborn foal, another beautiful baby girl -

And then she -

And then Fell -

And then the child -

And then there was nothing left to them but gore, the life and the love and the fragile bonds held within the tiny body at their hooves taken from this world mere minutes after it was brought forth. Nothing left but blood, and death, and Vitani's endless screams.

Something had broken her, but it had also broken him. She saw the rage in Fell's eyes, the fury he could not voice, and she fled, hiding herself away as the curly-eared wretch ravaged the Islands in his grief. She watched as he brought home mare after mare, watched him come home battle-worn and bleeding time and time again, watched him lose everything, and knew it was all her fault. It was her he carried water for, her those teeth and hooves were meant to punish, her who should have been sacrificed for the peace of all five Islands... and yet she could not bring herself to do it. Couldn't bring herself to face him, step up to the beast he had become and offer up her whitesplashed throat for him to open. She had lost her second daughter, but her first was still out there, and Vitani had promised to come back for her.

There came a point, a season ago, when Fell was finally distracted enough for her to put the Bay at her back and flee, and the image of her daughter, still so young in her mind's eye, standing on that distant swampy shore and waiting for her, was the only thing that kept her from slipping below the choppy waters that carried her to freedom and tasting true oblivion. She refused to even entertain the idea. She had to go back - had to get her out of that stallion-infested prison like she'd sworn she would. She traveled down the length of the main island over the course of several days, stopping only when her legs could no longer carry her. She barged into the Lagoon like she owned the place, daring any-fucking-body to try and stop her.

And Zira - the tether that had pulled her, the light that led her home - was gone.

She'd searched the entire goddamn season, spending the most dangerous time of the year in the most dangerous place on the Islands for a lone, unclaimed, uncoupled mare to be, and found no trace of her long-lost daughter. She scoured every old hiding place, riffled through every nook and cranny, left no stone unturned, no curtain of tangled spanish moss undisturbed - nothing. Not a trace of her, not a scent, not even a withering pile of bones.

Vitani had refused to accept defeat, believing against everything that she would find her golden little girl - until now, the last bit of her hormones and her thrashing, aimless grief snapping the hair-thin thread that held her inside of herself. She charged from the Lagoon, dirty and thin and rangy, and began her long trek back North, slipping into the Common without a care for anything or anyone. Her blue eyes glow in the light of the late afternoon sun, tears streaming down her face, and her body trembles - from exhaustion, despair, rage, some mix of the three, she can't tell. She pauses at the crest of a hill; long, golden grasses brush across her frame, reminding her of Zira, and she takes a gulp of chilled autumn air and screams.

Zira is gone, and so is the nameless little girl the whitesplashed mare had no right to love, and as soon as she can reach the confines of the Bay - and Fell's open, waiting jaws - Vitani will be, too.