Antares lingered with his brothers for only the moment it took to tell them of Sayyida’s labor, then he was off and desperately trying to keep himself from exploding out of his own skin. She had been in such discomfort-- his emotion runs away with him.

He had done that to her.

His ears pinned down into his mane as he ripped angrily into a bush on the bank of their herd’s primary oasis. He tore it to tatters, shredding it in furious guilt that he had been so cavalier with her well-being. He had never seen a mare come into labor, had never seen labor at all. His mother was kept sequestered so as to keep her at peace during the last portion of her pregnancy and birth. He had not known that Sayyida would-- but it doesn’t matter now, he thinks, savaging the whole plant till it was just twings and fragments of giant, flat leaves.

He is glad she does not see him like this, glad she does not know that her fear and pain - no matter how prettily deflected - had affected him so deeply. He could still smell her on the desert wind, the oasis he had given her allowing her scent to find him along with that of Sidika, the Healer, and Naz, her oldest friend. He didn’t normally trust the Tekes in general due to their inherent bias for their own kind, but Sidika was not the kind to care who it was she tended as long as she tended them and they improved. It made him at least drift in his thinking, the thought that his Sayyida was not alone.

He, in particular, was not compelled to value any gender of child - so burdened by his one-time loss that he’d have been glad so long as it took breath and knew him as Father. He does not dwell on it as Sayyida does, has for quite some time. His fretting stems from elsewhere -- it is more the thought that he might lose her for his own wanton folly in having her for himself in the season... that the gods might trick him with the torment and slaking of Qetesh and Min only to then lose his Soul Sewn in the first year of her love.

He heard her from across the dunes and it does not help. The distance made her noises faint enough that they did not wrench his heart from his meaty chest - though he wished it would have. He would have deserved it. He would have welcomed it if it could stop the injury he caused in his naive treatment of ‘pregnancy’, ‘labor’, and ‘childbirth’.

It was amidst the scattered ruins of the plant he had just now trampled even more fully into the sand in his haste to rid himself of the burning anger at the pain laced insound and caught on the wind - yes, that was when he realized that there had come a sort of eerie quiet. It hurt him, that moment of total silence like he thought nothing could have ever before or ever again… and then he whipped his head in alarm to face the direction of the next sound heard in the Dunes.

Sidika.

His heart stopped for a moment, eyes prickling with a desperation so deep that it threatened to wring tears out of him. That is, of course, until he saw in her face a neutral calm that defied any frantic behavior on his part. She stopped the overflow, well before it even began, with that face.

Suddenly, he realized he had held his breath, exhaling with a weakness in his legs that almost betrayed him to the sand beneath. "She and the child are well and resting. She will come to you soon." The look the stallion offered was one not only of respect but deference, taking the unspoken command to remain away as seriously as he had taken the command of his First Wife to leave her. "You are blessed of Taweret and Meskhenet. I will not forget your service to my Mira." He did not know if such an oath mattered to one so stoic, so separate of him and his People, but it was spoken with the very deep-running gravity of his traditions.

It felt like only moments after Sidika had left him to her own devices that he caught the powerful scent whisked toward him, catching his throat and turning his whole being to face the way Sidika had come. He raced, then, to the bordering dune peak at the edge of the oasis, eyes wide as he looked at last on the figures of red and pink that approached. Her introduction almost misses his ears entirely, so fixated on the little princess at its mother’s side as to leave little room else.

"I want you to meet our daughter."

The scent of her is intoxicating in a way he had never known possible, so wrapped up in things personal and beloved as it was. She smelled of him, of his Beautiful One, and of something that was entirely alien to anything ever been in the world before. The child's own identity, unique and apart from all others…

He barely moved despite his heaving breaths, his wide eyes nearly indiscernible as he tried to remember how to exist outside of that scent. "This is your father, habibti. He loves you as much as I do."

Sayyida pushes the filly just a little forward and as if that were the counterspell needed, the child and it’s father brush whiskered muzzles against one another. His eyes widen, the sensation in his chest almost more than he can bear, he squeals a short, high, note and dances to the side in anxious nerves -- as careful of the filly as he must be -- and then lets out a peal of laughter unlike any he had ever made before.

"ϩⲱⲥ Ⲑⲟⲩⲏⲣⲓ. Ϩⲱⲥ Ⲙϣⲛⲧ. Ϩⲱⲥ ϧⲛⲟⲩⲙ ⲟⲩⲟϩ Ϩⲉⲕⲉⲧ. " Praise to the gods Taweret and Meskhenet, goddesses of birth. Praise to the one who breathed life into the body, Heket, to the one who fashioned that body in the womb, Khnum. He knows that his Sayyida has thanked her Allah - he does not harry he whom she worked with tedious babblings.

He stops abruptly, wide eyed and apologetic about his outburst, before dropping his head low towards the filly again. "ⲁⲛⲟⲕ ⲙⲉ ⲛⲑⲟ, I love you," he manages sweetly, more calmly.

That is when he looks up from the creation and towards the one who bore her. He is trembling with his excitement but far too wise to exert it again, snapping his tail instead. "Are you well? Shall I call our brothers? Where is your friend? Should you be on your feet--." He is deliberate as he approaches her, suddenly compelled to search her entire form for the cause of the cries in the distance, but finding her rather unscathed and finding himself relieved in answer to the discovery. He will offer penance for the little bush later.

And then the most minor movement draws his gaze back to the girl who so captured him, once again awed at the little being who smelled of them both and herself alone. Perfect. She was perfect… "Have you spoken to her her name?"