Sidika’s efforts to calm Merwerit, spirited and emotional Merwerit, work almost immediately. The lack of expression of her fears made for a heady cocktail of confidence and Merwerit drank it up in earnest. She is asked if it was her first and it recalls to her mind the fact she had, only just last year, said she’d never put a foal on the ground. What a fickle beast she was, she says, the panic rising again before she answers in a high and breathy voice, "It is-- It is, yes."

Then she is swiftly about the business of eating the offered bitter-aloe, obedient now in the same manner she had once been to the stablehand who could feed her the great vitamin pills without much argument at all. It makes her feel strange, the food in her belly, and stranger once the aloe begins to work on her. As she loses herself in the remnant taste, she is brought back to the now - the colt and mare’s investigation done mostly with her unawares.

She rises when she is bidden, but she is startled at the sudden grip of Sidika onto the breastband that thunks at her chest and tugs unpleasantly down on her withers with her testing of it. Only one head toss, though, and then she is stilled - squinted eyes bearing her through the discomfort as the leather binding finally gives beneath Sidika’s teeth and the metal is lifted in a dead loop from over her head..

"There. Now bebek won't get caught."

The ploy works, Merwerit’s eyes wide and relieved despite how they once again pinch in a response to the newest contraction. The boy skitters off with it as soon as his mother flings it away from them all, her eyes marking him before they turn back to where the human bondage had left a worn couple spots -- it would heal, would grow back, she knows… but somehow the distraction was welcome, her nose reaching towards the bare spot in her withers with no hope of actually touching there.

She misses the dilemma Sidika experiences, misses her pondering as she instead ponders the unusual need to pace, to turn in circles, to send a stray kick when a contraction got too fresh with her towards the underside of her belly with an irritated tail snap.

Sidika, however, sends her boy away and it does attract the poor laboring mother’s attention at last. The discarded jewelry does not find itself missed, but she rather did miss the fresh face of the boy who had been helping his mother tend her. "Lay when ready. Is no rush. Bebek will say when its time."

She does this, of course, right away. The antsy walking had been feeling so off and wrong and unbalanced that it had sounded quite the better option even moments after it was suggested.

Her daughter wasted no time at all. Each command was obeyed, of course. Each time Sidika praised her for doing as she was told, each time she scolded her for resisting -- it made life keep it’s spark in her efforts. By the end she is thick in lather and while she is not overworn - quite an average birth, Sidika would know - she is amazed she had not died trying to release her golden nugget resting there in the sands behind her haunches.

As if the metal of her bindings were given life, molten and shaped in the exact figure of the perfect Akhal Teke child, there she lays… she. A daughter. A beautiful, molten gold, daughter -- a match for her black half-brother who had gone off to spend time with his father during the birth. She rolls up onto her feet before she even realizes that perhaps she should have asked Sidika if she may. She is cleaning, is washing, is admiring the shining filly with satin-sheen fuzz to only further her golden appearance.

"Sarısı," the name comes to her in both she and Sidika’s native tongue. What else could the child be called but ‘of gold’. "It is almost as though our children took only one part of him, Sidika...."