Rhadra listens patiently to Iscariot’s reply, her expression sympathetic when he speaks of his sister. Did she challenge his world-view with as much affection as Rhadra’s own sister had displayed? All exasperation and “why-don’t-you-know-this” and “can’t-you-stop-that” at any sign of an emotion other than calm or happy, with no real patience for any personal turmoil afflicting her younger sibling?
Perhaps Iscariot is the older sibling. Rhadra wonders idly how that dynamic might be different even as he explains he was meant to be heir, and why it could not be so. Her eyes flick to his back legs. He seems healthy enough to her, and she’s witnessed him hold his weight in a rear as he struck the ice. But she is no fighter, no band stallion with a herd to protect. Perhaps he speaks true, and his hind legs would betray him, buckling under the surging force of another stallion. Her dark eyes return to his. The question she poses him sounds simple enough, but well does Rhadra know it isn’t.
“What makes life worth living, to you?”
She has grappled with this concept herself. The despair of leading a life that fails to live up to the expectations of others and, worse, yourself, is painfully familiar to her. Since her maturity from filly to mare she has been faced with the reality that she is not meant to bear children. Three years in a row, beneath the rule of three separate band stallions, she proved to be barren. The weight of that pain nearly broke her— but it had been so easy in the end, hadn’t it? To simply stand up and walk away. To start somewhere new, as herself, as a Rhadra fully-realized who understood that it simply wasn’t meant to be— so what next? And so she poses that question to Iscariot, too, having found it so freeing for herself:
“And now that you’re on your own, unburdened by your past— what next for you, and only you?”
rhadra