VaLkA

mare / six / chestnut pangare / yakut / 13.0 hh

Twilight crept across the eastern edge of the sky, melding the darkness of night and the nebulous light of the stars into a seamless grey— but the dawn that should have followed never arrived.

Valka watched for it from where she stood, a lone ember amidst the shadowed dunes of her slumbering herd. More than once, her dark eyes flitted over the jagged scar of white that marked where her Hersir stood on the bluff above. But of the sun’s light, she glimpsed nothing at all. Where it should have risen, a mass of black clouds bloomed like a bruise, swelling to consume more and more of the sky’s ashen skin. Twisting her small ears toward the distant growl of thunder, the skjaldmær felt the life within her stir restlessly, felt the dull ache of her first contraction. And though the shaggy chestnut was compelled by instinct to surrender to its rhythmic pulse, instead she steeled herself against it. Not yet, her thoughts pleaded. She wasn't ready.

Over the seasons since this foal’s conception, Valka had reflected endlessly on the errors of her past. Searching for wisdom amidst the ashes of her pain, seeking redemption in this second chance that she’d been given. In the end, the Yakut concluded that her gravest mistake was when she’d called upon her son to make his first choice. With the benefit of hindsight, she could see now that she hadn’t been giving Solvarr the freedom to determine his own fate... nor any sort of freedom at all. Instead, she’d forced him to make an impossible decision between the mother he loved and the father he longed for. This time— no matter what sort of sacrifices it might demand— she was determined that her child would know true freedom. And that they would know their sire from the first breath they took.

By the time her third contraction had passed, the red skjaldmær knew there would be no halting the inevitable. Lurching abruptly forward, she scrabbled up the bluff and let Bacardi know her intentions in a hastily-murmured conversation. When it was finished, she touched her lips to the dark skin of his neck in silent gratitude, turned her back to the Bay’s herd, and began to head for the distant mountains of Solomon’s home at a steady lope. But there was no outrunning the storm, which bore down upon her home like a pack of gaunt and hungry wolves— howling and snapping at her heels with sharp cold fangs. By the time that she reached the border between her home and the Cove, Valka’s fluffy coat was soaking wet and flattened against the curves of her body— and each stride that she took became a battle in itself.

A battle that she lost in the foothills at the Cove’s northeastern edge, halting abruptly as the sky was lit by a flash of white fire, and the air around her shook with a resounding boom. Legs buckling beneath her, the chestnut mare felt her unborn child give a spirited kick— as if he or she were answering the savagery of the storm with a challenge of their own. As if they were heralding their arrival into this world with the same sort of fierce determination that the Yakut had warred against it. Flattening her ears, the foal's mother snorted defiantly even as she felt a surge of dampness that had nothing to do with the rain, as she rode another wave of pain to its crest.

And then surrendered for only the second time in her life, bearing down to bring the tiny warrior-child into this world.