Meadow

She is in pain. In pain in the heart, the body, the soul. Her first steps on this soil had been briefly relieved. Free, young, wild - she had shone with such promise. That shining, however, was her undoing. Apollo had come. He had come like the whirlwind, the typhoon, and battered her till she could bear nothing more. Entitled, he said under his breath. He had been angry, though she could tell it was not at her. Angry at another who’d refused him, turned him aside so that there was only wreckage to be had beneath him.

She had survived, surprisingly, the onslaught. What she hadn’t known then was how sorry she would be to have. He had brought pain into her world, fogged the clear and broad and wide world beyond the next step, the next bite. And now, swollen, she cannot fathom how to go about laying to the earth and bringing out of herself the result of his rape.

Her body had a mind to insist, today, however. It was sure that it was time and would not be turned away this time. So many times an interesting flavor or a bad weather shift had made it easier for her to resist - but now she realized the flaw in that plan as she laid down with an intense stabbing pain radiating from her belly and down her back legs.

It puts her on the ground.

She tries not to squeal, but the labor is - well, laborious. She tries not to shake and tremble, but she had seen mares die of poorly timed and poorly prepared birthing. She fights to push, fights not to push, and by the end she is thick in lathered foam and blearily licking a little red dun overo filly at her belly.

Suddenly, as if pure and washing magic had washed her clean, her eyes beheld the perfection of the child blinking and spluttering. The axis of the universe tilted, Atlas lost balance of his lifelong duty. This little filly was suddenly the sun to orbit, the moon to pull the tides, and the stars to give light with either of those were missing. Her world swam, her head light and perhaps it had been a harder birth than would allow her to swiftly tend her daughter - but she decided in that moment she was glad to have finally let her witness the world, to have ceased to cave into the terror for that singularly imperative moment.

"Virgo," she pants out, a bare sigh, "because you are innocent and I gladly give that up to have you with me now."