Synder was late. Days late, she suspected, as she had felt contractions a few days ago; nothing had come of them, but the dark and heavily pregnant mare had felt on edge ever since. It felt as if the child inside were anticipating its birth, as if it were waiting like a racehorse waits for the bells. Not straining or struggling, but ready when the signal came.

And it did come, at the crack of dawn, beneath a heavy spring rain-storm. Synder panted as her body temperature fluctuated; with every contraction she felt a rush of heat, but the pauses between were chilly and she shivered until the waves returned, sooner and sooner each time. She was drenched in rain and sweat and the mud she lay in crept up her back and belly and the sides of her neck. It was cold mud, and she tried to squirm to a drier place, but nowhere was dry when it rained like this. She let her eyes close and her face slap down into the slimy ground again.

Wet hoofsteps alerted her to someone approaching. She opened her eyes again, water getting into her left and mud getting into her right, and she closed them again. It was only Mercury, her figure narrow and paler than Synder remembered. The dark mare had spotted another figure with her sister before she closed her eyes, a figure that was tiny and splotched and smelled like baby. Synder sighed once and then huffed in pain as another contraction seemed to wring her entire abdomen like someone wrings a wet rag. Whiskers ticked her forehead and a warm breath blew a few strands of forelock into different positions. ”You’re really hot,” Mercury said quietly, nervously. ”You’ve been here for a while, haven’t you?”

Synder jerked her head once. Yes. Another contraction might have made her scream, and this one didn’t go away entirely; Synder struggled and pushed with all her might, but something seemed stuck inside of her. Mercury whimpered, ignoring the colt's bold advances toward Synder’s hind end until he lowered his curious nose to her tail. Mercury turned her attention briefly to him then, putting her ears back and opening her mouth to the air between them. The colt responded by throwing his head and leaping away dramatically, landing and slipping and falling on his painted rump in the mud. Mercury carried on ignoring him after that.

Synder’s breaths came loud and quick. She was exhausted and hurt everywhere, but Mercury told her to stay awake and breathe and push. She even brought her silent sister a stick to bite on, since she couldn’t scream or wail, and Synder bit it until her teeth ached and bark and pieces of wood splintered into her mouth.

For a while it seemed as if Synder’s labor was not getting her anywhere, and she began to fear dying like this. What would happen if she ran out of energy? Her body couldn’t go on forever. This foal couldn’t stay inside of her forever, either. One, or maybe both of them, she thought with dread, were not going to survive this.

When her stick was splintered around her mouth and Mercury’s breath almost as quick as Synder’s, her abdominal muscles seemed at last to find purchase on the child’s body. This was almost worse than the purgatory she had been suffering for the past several hours (or so it felt like) because it seemed her body could not open wide enough for the object it was trying so desperately to dispense. She thrashed and kicked and squirmed and pushed, so hard it felt like she might be torn apart but she didn’t care. She just wanted the damn thing out.

And suddenly it was. There wasn’t much relief for the pain, but Synder was free of an immense amount of pressure and tension, and that was enough to stop her from moving altogether. Her tail and hind legs seemed to be swimming in wet heat, and Mercury made a frightened noise behind her, but Synder couldn’t bring herself to care very much. Her consciousness slipped quietly away and her senses faded into a wonderful silence.