Meadow

The difficulty of the birth made for a devastating blow, the pain and struggle unprecedented in her young life. Until then, even the rape had not laid her so low. Low of mind, perhaps, but not so low of body. It was perhaps her curse, that all Apollo had done would be imprinted in every pain that would come after. Perhaps, she wonders, it would even steal her now amidst her joy over the product of his ignorant indifference to herself. A blessing, he had seemed to think it. A gift.

The child was a gift, though she was not entirely what he had meant, she knew.

Her only blessing at all was that he was not here, not able to have the perfection of the child she had formed in her belly. When she finally falls back to the earth, she realizes how very prone, how very vulnerable, how very unprotected she and her newborn are. It is too much, too much so that even when someone breaks past foliage, she can do nothing more than shift her eyes from where her head had laid back to the earth.

"Oh-- Oh, hey." The words come to the other mare, but she cannot seem to make any herself, relief washing up from her gut at the sight of a mare and not a predator. "I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude- I-" But it seems that the pleading look of desperate need in her eyes stops the apology in its tracks. "Are you alright?" The mare looks half about to flee and the desperation reaches a fever pitch in her eyes. She remembers now that he had said he would be back for what he had left inside her. It is not only predators that she must fear.

"Please," it is about all she can muster for a moment, her every muscle spasming and flickering and flinching in pain. The laxness of her face is comparably mortifying, "Do not leave her." She already believes herself lost, of course - her recent history had taught her that fate could be the cruelest trick of them all. She already believes that she will not see her little painted beauty grow - that there is no healer to be found that can help her regain herself and her feet. She had already been laying so long.

"I… I do not think she came correct… I do not remember my mother feeling so… wounded..." she says, rich and sweet alto finally making full use of her breath and will for the other mare to understand the odds. A difficult birth, a foal who may have come out wrong, a birth where it was only by luck that both were even yet still living. "I know… I know no healers… but she cannot be here… she cannot be here when he comes..."