She and her son had been here for a week already. It had been a hard swim, so round as she was and despite the fact her womb made her feel more buoyant than usual. Cold and rough seas in the strait between mainland and island chain had caused her labor, in fact, and her first act as new acquisition had been to provide a son to the soil she determined was her new home.
She had not been unloved, nor unwanted, but for her - betrayal had come in form of her third-born son. He killed his father for supremacy of the lands she had trodden since her own birth. Of course she forgave him, for both the death of his father and the father of her newborn son, but that was because it was simply the way. The land where she came from was limited - older males never saw infirmity of their end-stage of life.
Still, a mother was not someone often desired by a son looking to form his own limited empire - and less so a brother or sister. She was only too glad, seeing her son laying behind her, that she had left none too long after his father had passed. He would have been targeted as well as his father and she’d have been all alone.
So here she was, watching her son frolick despite the heat that limited her to shaded splotches. She might not have been accustomed to bitter cold, but the quite terribly warm spring was not any better. She was a temperate creature, at least so long as her freedom and family did not require more of her. Her velvet nose presses through rich grasses, spring-strong in their fragrance and the pulp that it became as her teeth crushed it so full of life that she almost understood her boy's exuberance. Maybe a moment more of quiet stillness, truly playing with her boy was no trouble at all.
"Vulcan! Not so close. The water is turned, we will not tempt your father to come and take us into the Star Fields!" she is stern, but there is a soft love in her voice all the same. It is the soft love that makes him give her stern rebuke a look of actual repentance. He doesn’t mean to displease her, after all. He only means to run the scope of the globe in a single day, of course.
That is when she notices a large figure not too far from where her son plays. She picks up a trot that breaks her cinder and ash coloration into the sunlight and places her in a pretended air of ‘oh sure, i’m not running to save my child’. Mothers, after all, should never trust strangers with their young so far from hand.