The day Kudzu was born, Çiçek found her voice. She’d used it to yell; to curse; to cry; to beg forgiveness. She’d spoken so much her throat burned, so much that the muscles in her diaphragm stretched gossamer-thin and delicate like spider silk. She spoke - and then, when night fell and the time came for the inhabitants of the Ridge to settle in for the night, Çiçek realized she could speak no more. Her eyes caught in the moonlight, wide and wild and flashing luminous gold in their reflections, and she flat-out refused to bed down near the others, taking a moment when nobody was watching to melt, unseen, into the shadows with Kudzu. The spotted mare found a place, impossibly dark, sheltered under leathery elephant ear leaves; when she finally laid her head to rest, her son’s tiny frame nestled perfectly beside her, her sleep came easily. Safe under the protection of those she’d loved - and who had once loved her, too, in what felt like someone else’s life - Çiçek embraced the call of the void, pitching herself over the edge and into endless oblivion.

When she woke, stirred to consciousness by both the bright rays of sun peeking through the canopy and Kudzu’s insistent nudges, her voice was gone again.

Çiçek had fought her way out of the fire, making it out by the skin of her teeth, but the burns left from her ordeal still blistered and wept and stung, and without the agony of the flames actively consuming her to drown it out she felt the pain from them all too keenly. During those first few days, she’d varied between two poles: on one end, she spent hours either sleeping or staring, catatonic and unresponsive, at some indiscernible point in the distance. Kudzu was a boisterous thing, bold and protective, and he’d wasted no time in chasing away every curious, interloping child who got too close to his dam (Save Hades, who’d been with him from the start and was as much, if not more, of a brother as he could imagine). In a way, the overwhelming presence of the foals was a balm on her wounds: a swirling flock of little hummingbird bodies flitting around her, cacophonous and electric and alive, simultaneously reflecting the conflict still roiling like smoke inside the chambers of her heart and whisking it away on the draft made from the wake of their tiny beating wings. When the noise of her thoughts roared loud in her fluted ears, beating against her eardrums until she thought they’d bleed, only they - Kudzu, Hades, Asphodel, Prima, Zvaid, Roisin and Lorcan and all the rest - could drown it out.

But with one end of the spectrum came another. Without silence, one would not know sound, and just as the demons hounding her reached their peak, so, too, did they taper off, until Çiçek noticed the constant ambient thrum of the jungle she’d cocooned herself in. Every shifting leaf, every broken twig, every unknown shadow was enough to trigger a panic response. She’d tremble, eyes wide, a doe backed into a corner by wolves only she could see, and when the threat she knew was there got too close she’d dart, swiftly and seamlessly, into the ether.

Today had been one of those days. Çiçek couldn’t sit still, despite her deep fatigue. A mantle of inconsolable restlessness had settled over her, itchy and hot, and because of it she’d not slept at all the night before. She’d started the evening in the heart of the Ridge, but she was so determined to wander, so driven against lingering in one spot for too long, that by morning she could smell the salt of the ocean in her flared pink nostrils as it filtered, barely a whisper, between the trees. Something had felt… different, there, not right. As if a pebble had been knocked out of place, and though she instinctively sensed the disruption, she couldn’t point to where it might have been so that she might correct it. The rush of the tide in her ears calls her forth, beckoning with its familiar siren song - and she cannot help but to answer. She is a leaf, drifting on the current, floating out to sea. Caught in the grip of something much bigger than herself, now, and lost to her control.

The first thing Çiçek notes is the glare of the bleached white sand, peeking in brilliant widening strips around the canopy’s backlit silhouette. Hoofprints pockmark the loose terrain in various paths, and she follows them, her half-lidded stare tracking their progress to and from the crystalline, teal-green water. This bit of coast seems empty - at least, it does until the wind shifts, blowing her platinum locks back instead of sideways, and brings along with it a scent that stops her where she stands.

“Bebek,”“Baby,” she whispers, finding her voice once more. Baby. A baby - but where?

Cold dread drags its fingers down her spine, and though Çiçek shivers against it she doesn’t slow her pace. She focuses so much on the tiny, fresh set of prints coming out of the water, ambling inland, that she doesn’t even pick up on the larger ones beside them, and when she finally spots her - a child, young enough to still need mare’s milk, clad in shades of crimson and cream - she sees only the look on the filly’s innocent face, the hope and yearning and foolish naivete, and not the white-painted stallion who’d brought her.

Not when she carves a way through the undergrowth, chlorophyll and black earth staining her fur. Not when she reaches the threshold, and not even when she crosses it, her dun-striped physique stark as she comes fully into the light and glows beneath the smudges and the scrapes and the shine worn down by so many hard knocks.

Not until the breeze, unpredictable and inevitable, changes its direction, flooding her with a masculine, pine-laced scent that sends her pulse into the stratosphere and her breath choking out in one sharp gasp. Not until she feels the air on her skin, and the sun on her mottled back, and the absence of the forest’s many hands brushing constantly along her hide. Not until Çiçek meets the striking emerald gaze that had once bewitched her so thoroughly, so completely, that she’d moved heaven and earth to keep it for herself.

“Solomon?” she calls out timidly, afraid she’d dreamed him up and drowning under an avalanche of her own making.

Brought forth by the sound of his mother’s lilting voice, Kudzu steps out from under cover of darkness, blissfully ignorant of the part he played in the golden girl’s ultimate undoing.