Perhaps this was for the best, losing the comfort of their home; but was it ever truly theirs?

Dark lips run along her son’s red back while she ponders her troubled thoughts, the colt basking in the attention of his mother who idly does her daily grooming of him and his darker twin, the other boy ever silent unlike his boisterous brother. She’d listened to her husband’s plight, lended her ear to his brother’s in turn, and took a better stance as to view the whole picture of what has happened so far in their once peaceful lands. The very sands she stands on now are stained with the blood of sidika, and the stallion who’d been the leader before antares. Eness owed the medicine woman everything, for if not for her then she would only have Al Murzim at her side.

Mother, who is that?, Al Murzim’s voice is a quiet murmur against the breast of her chest, which had pulled away to watch a pale stranger accompanied by another leggy colt make their way to the little group before pointing them out to Eness. His mother’s sharp intake of breath is both felt and heard, Murzim’s head lifting from her skin as she moves away from him and his sibling but neither are eager to let her move too much farther out of their reach and are quick to scramble after her.

“Sakhmet,” her name is a whispered breath of longing, her tone filled with a sadness she hadn’t let herself feel since the twins were born, but to have her heart here at long last? It was everything Eness had prayed to her moon for. Dark eyes plead for the warrior woman to stay where she is, and then her eyes are falling to the young boy at her side that clings to her just as Eness’s own two did. “He is blessed with the colors of the sand,” she praises her old friend, wanting nothing more than to greet the colt and love him like her own.

“Al Murzim,” she urges the redder of her twins forward, his comet streaked face dipping to the mare who clearly meant something to his mother; he could feel her body shake against his own. Eness tilts her head to her other side, to the colt that was as silent as the night and lacked a voice that the moon herself had clearly claimed for granting Eness and Atair the gift of twin’s. “Al Hilal. The moon’s blessing,” Eness strokes her nose down his crescent marked face a moment, glad for a brief distraction as she pulls herself together. There was only so much time before Atair took notice of them being gone.

She feels herself break when she meets the eyes of her heart. “I am so terribly sorry,” Eness begins, yet can’t find it in herself to continue on as the tears swell within her eyes and spill down her cheeks. Murzim stomps his hooves, flicking his tufts of tail against his mother as the very act of her grief was unsettling and he wanted the strange mare to stop whatever she was doing to make his mother so upset.