“Hide,” she hissed, venom on her tongue. The long-limbed gold speckled colt did exactly that, shifting down into the thick foliage and lying with just a whisper of noise made as the blades brushed around his body. Like a fawn would curl up, he did as well, legs tucked and chin pressed against the dirt. But his eyes – wide and gold – looked up at the mare that was his mother. She’d been hiding since she’d given birth to him. Any day now, Dock told herself, she’d take her hoof and slam it onto his thin, frail neck. Any day now her teeth would bite his crest and she’d shake him until he was nothing more than a bag of bones, not this living, breathing thing that suckled from her teat and watched her with such wide and cautious eyes. She’d tell Hickere and Dickere that he’d been birthed dead and they would believe her. The burden would be hers alone to bear for what she had actually done.
Yet even though there had been a time or two where her anger toward him had gotten the better of her and she’d nipped at his haunches, earning a squeal as he darted out of her path, Dock couldn’t do it. She couldn’t kill him. Even if looking at him made her stomach turn and remember the stallion that had tormented her for days until she consented… even if she was always filled with a rage when he tried to inch close to her, when he clicked his mouth at her in a hope she would cave to compassion… Dock couldn’t kill him.
She’d named him. Nephilim.
But she wasn’t ready for the world to see him. She wasn’t ready for the world to see her, either. So she’d kept hiding in the forest, avoiding the herd when they came near, trailing the border of the Prairie and staying in the shadows as she searched hopelessly for signs of Valentine… only to dart back into the woodlands when she saw him. She didn’t want him to see the colt either. She… she was ashamed by the sight of him. This little freckled thing that was so frail and dependent on her, innocent of the sin which had brought him into this world and yet blamed for it all the same.
As he obeyed his mother – the only soul he’d known – and tucked down beneath the shadows of the ferns, Dock stepped forward and away from him. She’d heard someone coming, too close where she could run away from them without being seen. Her heart beat frantically in her chest as she stepped cautiously forward, waiting to see who it was she would finally have to face in this forest where she’d been nothing but a ghost for so long…
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