It seems only yesterday that Arkana had tearfully revealed her pregnancy to her mother and Aunt Persephone. It seems only yesterday that she had simply been a young mare with the world at her feet, endless possibilities scattered in every direction. Yet at the same time, her pregnancy has felt endlessly long; the day she’s rid of the thing growing in her belly cannot come quickly enough for Arkana, as long as she doesn’t think too deeply about the details of that process. At least in the beginning she had been able to push the reality of her condition to the back of her mind, but now - this late in the gestation period - her memory needs no prompting. With her huge belly affecting her balance and making her breathless at the most inopportune times, as well as the almost constant deep ache in her pelvis and the occasional flutter of movement inside, it’s impossible not to think about it much of the time.

Especially when her mother asks her for the twentieth time if she’s decided what to do with the child when it arrives.

“That foal is family. You can’t just throw a family member away,” Evren had screamed at her the first time Arkana had wailed that she was too young to be a fit mother for anyone. After many more arguments, and after Evren had grudgingly accepted that not even she could raise the child as her own, given her lack of milk - as well as the lack of milk of anyone else in the herd - Evren had tried a final tactic: revealing the stillborn she’d had years ago, well before Arkana or her siblings were born.

“You don’t know what it is to lose a child,” her mother had said in half a whisper, her voice hitching in her throat and her copper eyes faraway. Touched as Arkana had been by the reveal of a scar her mother had carried silently for so long, it is not an experience she can relate to. She still feels half a child herself; the idea of her carrying a living thing is still so abstract and alien that she cannot see it as anything other than a complication she wants rid of. In the following days, however, she had found herself more patient with her mother’s outbursts, knowing that Evren’s sharp tongue and fierce judgements came from a place of deep hurt and loss. Sometimes Arkana even wonders if there is more Evren is not telling her, for Arkana cannot understand grieving so intensely over something you never truly had.

Her mismatched eyes are focused thoughtfully on her sisters as she grazes one warm spring day, pondering the idea of them becoming aunts, when her name is called through the trees. She pricks her ears with a puzzled expression, for the voice isn’t a familiar one. After exchanging a glance with Evren, Arkana waddles off through the trees, wincing at the branches that claw at her wide barrel, and comes face to face with a mare whose name it takes her a moment to recall.

“Feray?” she says in a quizzical tone. It had been some time ago that Arkana had visited Roheryn in the Badlands, and although she’d become familiar with most of the herd’s names, she does not know any of them well: not well enough, at least, to explain Feray’s unexpected visit.

“What are you doing here? Is Ro okay?” she asks, her eyes sliding briefly down to note the mare’s obvious pregnancy.