"If Love himself weep, shall not lovers weep,
learning from what sad cause he pours his tears?
Love hears his ladies crying their distress,
showing forth bitter sorrow through their eyes
because villainous Death has worked its cruel
destructive art upon a gentle heart,
and laid waste all that earth can find to praise
in a gracious lady, save her chastity."

OOC: I figured they should have a thread & meet before they do the deed.

Their son would be big. Her son. Stout, wide-chested. Thick tree trunks for legs and a strong, muscular topline. The sooty-colored colt was but a few months old, but even then, it was impossible to deny the masculine features he inherited from his father. Flashes of Dexter were apparent every time the colt moved. His low, feline-like, stalking strides. His dark, inquisitive stare. The way the colt's nostrils flared in and out when he looked at his mother, when he looked through her, past her, just as his father did when she'd met him in the commons that night many months ago. It made her angry sometimes. Irrationally so. It made it difficult to look at him, at the small foal that had come from her own flesh and blood. It made her feel guilty and ugly inside. Macabre feared she was not fit to be a mother.

She wished, at times, that she never gave birth to the foal at all. But here he was, and now she was responsible for his upbringing. It was an instinct, that despite her conflicted feelings, the ones about the world around her and the despair she'd witnessed first hand, to the aggression that fueled throughout her for Shiraz's father, she mothered the child. She did not hesitate to clean him, to nurse him. Her heart skipped a beat when Shiraz disappeared from view for a moment too long. Like it or not, Shiraz was apart of her.

And so, she worried. The colt seemed to be growing weaker rather than stronger as he aged. The hissing and weezing in his breathing patterns was getting worse. Sometimes he would be winded from doing nothing at all. Other times his moves would falter, his steps jagged and careless as if his brain temporarily could not communicate with his muscles. Something inside of him, apart of him, was failing. The worry would come in waves. Macabre would inspect every inch of her son's body, looking for something out of place -- something she could fix -- and find nothing. Still, her mute son would look at her with curious eyes, the stare she hated and she would have to walk away. Macabre couldn't shake the feeling that her son would die soon.

And so, the cycle would continue. Her only loved one would be ripped from her, like the few that came before him. She could not stop the Reaper this time. Macabre stood idly among a grouping of trees, listening to the wind as it carried through the brush. Shiraz stalked a lizard in the distance, his strides weak and unmethodical. His tics, it seems, were worse today than the day prior.