When Rougaru told her what they’d - what she’d - done, she’d fled, using some half-hearted excuse to peel herself away from him and melt into the growing shadows. Çiçek walked at first, forcing a calmness into her movements; there was a power lurking beneath the stranger’s scar-riddled hide, a darkness in his jade-green eyes that she didn’t want to tempt. Not while her body was still so sore and her head only just cleared of fever.

The second Çiçek made it out of earshot, though, she lost the vice grip she held on her composure. Her pulse roared hot in her ears; cold sweat pricked down her spine, and her lungs sat tight in her chest, forcing the air out of her in shallow gasps. Her steps quickened, taking her first to a trot, then a canter, and then a frenzied gallop. Large fronds dragged across her as she barreled carelessly through them, branches slicing multiple little cuts into her golden skin. She didn’t notice. She didn’t care. The pieces of her mind were falling from her control, one by one by one, no matter how she tried to hold them together.

In the process of losing her sanity, Çiçek finally found her breath - but when she opened her mouth, the only thing that came were screams, ones that burned like acid and shredded her throat to ribbons.

At first, she thought she’d never stop screaming. But after some time - hours, days, she couldn’t tell - when her vocal cords were destroyed and the little energy she’d had was spent, she found herself somewhere deep in the heart of Atlantis, surrounded by nothing but trees and the heavy, oppressive reality her own choices had brought forth. Exhausted, bruised, and totally alone, her rasping pants turned to sobs. She crumpled into a heap on the forest floor, stripped down to nothing by the breaking of her own heart, and watched with growing numbness as the shards of it drifted away on rivers of salty tears.

Then her cycle didn’t return, and she thought she’d never stop crying.

Guilt sat in her gut like a stone, dragging her under waves of shame. She might have been able to slip away, to swim back to Tinuvel and her tiny family and leave her mistakes behind her like some kind of horrible dream… but Çiçek couldn’t hide a pregnancy, and she wouldn’t hide a child. The foal was innocent; it had no say in the circumstances of its own creation, and she couldn’t blame it for her misfortune any more than she could blame the clouds in the sky. She did this. Solomon had tried to warn her, but she was foolish and overconfident and she didn’t listen. It was her actions that led her to this fate, and it was she who had to pay the price in blood.

Çiçek could never go back to the Cove. She knew that, and she knew it was her fault, hard as it stung to admit. She only wished she could have said goodbye to Şevket first.

Blind with grief, Çiçek stumbled through the motions. Days blurred into weeks, and weeks blended into months, the passage of time marked only by the increasing swell of her stomach. She became a wild thing, nocturnal and reclusive, hiding under layers of thick green foliage away from everything and everyone. Her dreams were the one source of happiness she had left, the one place where she could run from her problems, run and run and run until she was back in the pines of Tinuvel. Back a season or two, pausing on the well-worn path at sounds of a scuffle on the beach. Turning away from it this time, going back to the safety of the herd, and watching Şevket’s spotted rump as he danced nimbly ahead.

Every night she dreamt of her long-lost bebek. And every night, like clockwork, the sound of her own wailing cries jerked her out of her fantasies, forcing her to face the truth.

One late spring morning, though, something else wakes her. She doesn’t place it at first, brow furrowed groggily against the nagging discomfort lingering somewhere around her hindquarters. After a few minutes, it returns, and the familiarity of the cramping pain spreading out from her hips fills her with cold dread. She rocks unsteadily to her hooves, instinct driving her north. Her contractions worsen, and she hurries her pace as much as she can, crashing noisily through the trees. Çiçek didn’t know where she was; she’d stopped paying attention to the borders between territories long ago. All she knew as she stumbled along, pausing intermittently to ride out building waves of agony, was that - for the first time in nearly a year - she didn’t want to be alone. She wanted to go home, to a place where she’d once found comfort, and all she can pick out through the haze of her pain are her Guardians. They, too, probably wanted nothing to do with her… but if she could just get to the Ridge, she could have her child in the relative safety their dominion provided and slip back into obscurity, unnoticed.

The spotted mare trudges onward. The jungle changes around her: the cacophony of birds and other tropical fauna dies to a distant echo, and the potpourri of different fragrant blooms melds into one sharp, earthen note. Vines creep along the forest floor; they mingle with the other flora at first, twisting along together, but as she moves farther along their tender embrace turns to a strangling chokehold. Kudzu covers everything here, cloaking the skeletons of long-dead trees in rows and rows of flowerless spade-shaped emerald leaves.

Pain seizes her, too big to ignore. Her legs buckle involuntarily beneath her, bringing her to rest in a tangled bed of green. She can hear her own cries, smell the metallic tang of blood and afterbirth in the humid air, and feel herself pushing when the moment comes, but all she sees - all she can stand to focus on - is the ever-shifting grey of the clouds in the sky above.

Çiçek would have stayed there forever if not for a whinny in her ears. Her head lifts, answering the tiny voice with a low nicker; when she spots the tiny creature that made it, she gasps, and for the first time in months, the sob that comes unbidden from between her lips smacks not just of bitter melancholy, but sweet, dizzying relief.

The foal meets her searching brown gaze. He - for it’s a colt, she realizes - has broken his own birthing sac in his haste to sit up. He shakes the mucus off his face, snorting ash-grey nostrils to clear them, and whinnies at her once more, asking her to answer for the inconvenience and indignity of his own birth.

He is perfect, and he is hers, and she loves her second son as quick and as hard as she loved her first.

At long last, Çiçek finds her voice.

“Oh, kendine bak,”“Oh, look at you,” she rasps with awe as he flails, the words choked out around thick sobs. “Sen çok küçüksün.”“You’re so small.”

She reaches for the colt, and the instant her muzzle brushes across his forehead he falls still, as if her soft touch was the one thing he’d been searching for so desperately. Çiçek pauses for a moment, drinking in his scent, and tries to quiet the storm of her emotions crashing like thunder against her ribs.

“But I know you will grow big,” she finally adds, wiping his sandy-brown fur clean of afterbirth with wide strokes of her tongue. “And strong…”

She can taste the salt of her tears as they run in thick tracks down her cheeks.

“...like your father.”

Çiçek smooths his short brown mane into place, pulling back to survey her work. For a few moments, the colt doesn’t move; he blinks up at her, chocolate-rimmed ears tipped raptly forward, and the affection she feels for him is so all-encompassing, she wonders why she ever thought it might not come.

He shifts against her, already growing restless; Çiçek drapes herself around him, bringing him close. “Evet,”“Yes,” she murmurs definitively into his damp skin, a shadow of her once-beaming smile drifting across her lips. “You will ensnare the hearts of everyone you meet… just as you’ve done with mine.”

She loves him - even if it means losing everything.

“Oğlum,”“My son,” she whispers, lulled by the steady rise and fall of his chest. “Benim küçük nimetim. Benim Dünyam. Benim Kudzu.”“My little blessing. My world. My Kudzu.”