Time is meaningless to the newborn girl as she lays akimbo on the ground. Seconds, minutes, hours. They are as foreign to her as the concept of a sky above or ground below. What she knows is the warmth of her mother's womb, the gentle thud, thud of her heartbeat only inches away. She knows what its like to flail wildly at the cramped space of her bed, and how to entertain herself with incessant movement until the world faded into sleep with the steady beat of her mother's footsteps.

She did not know the cold. It wrapped around her in the absence of her dam's heat and she shivered meekly in the too-bright world, her too-big ears tipping back unhappily as she squinted against the glare. The space around her is too-large and too-empty, and the ground beneath is both too-hard and too-sharp to be right. She wants her mother. She wants the warm embrace of her comfort and the security afforded in her care, but she doesn't even know what she looks like, not truly.

Esmeray knew what her mother's heartbeat sounded like, but not the beautiful lines of her face. Still, the instinct in her blood remains a strong motivator, and she inches and worms herself free of the last vestiges of her birth and turns her luminous eyes on the only creature in her vicinity.

For a moment they only stare, pale green meeting blue and brown. Esmeray does not know why, but she holds her breath until her mother reaches for her, cementing what her instinct had been trying to tell her. This was her mother, albeit turned inside out and shaped differently. Esme doesn't recognize that her mother is hesitating, only that she wants to be closer somehow. Instinct demands contact and she knows that somewhere, somehow, Feray is hiding the good stuff if she could just figure out how to get to it.

Esme's path upward was rocky and paved with a series of wildly careening attempts as she swayed drunkenly back and forth. By the time her mother's kiss lands on her forehead, she is upright but only just so, her limbs splayed wide and trembling with the effort. Both wide seafoam eyes flick up to her mother as she speaks, and she stares avidly as her mother bathes her in forgiveness. Esme cannot know that her very existence is a source of pain for her mother. She knows only that she adores this strange walking, talking version of her mother more than her own life.

The warmth in those words earns a clumsy mimic of a smile, Esme's soft eyes crinkling as she reflects the adoration that she feels. But like with most children, her attention span is limited and the intoxicating scent of milk draws her attention downward. She wobbles forward - crashing into her mother's shoulder in the process - and searches all along her mother's side for the source. Gummy lips grab at her dam's elbow, and then belly, and then flank before finally reaching her target with a satisfied little grunt. The damp curls of her tail whisked eagerly across her rump as she nursed, her seafoam gaze shuttering as she quelled the hunger pains.

Only when she was finished did she stumble backward and turn to face her mother's eye. With the immediate need of hunger taken care of, she wanted to hear more of those soothing sounds that her mother made. They were different here than they had been from inside, but the soft croon of her voice was singlehandedly the most comforting thing that Esmeray had experienced since being expelled onto the dirt. Without regard for personal space, the filly's small mottled muzzle stretched up to meet her mother's. She wasn't entirely certain how to mimic the sounds that she had made, but she tried with a determined little bleat. "Ma?"