It started with a rumble of thunder, as deep and sonorous as if the earth were cracking in two.

Evren lifted her copper eyes to the sky, her breath coming out in a hiss as the pain subsided. Ominous black clouds hung on the horizon, but unless the wind shifted, they would miss the Crossing by miles. If Evren remained here in the sanctity of no-man's-land, she and her unborn child would be safe from the deluge.

And yet she could not bring herself to give birth here, across the sea from the mare she had fled from, in spite of everything that had been said and done between them. When she had searched earlier for a secluded place to deliver her child, nothing had felt right, and a lump of panic had risen in her throat. She could not do it. The deep maternal urge to deliver her foal in a place that was familiar - and where she did not have to worry about being stumbled upon by strangers - was too strong. The siren song of the Forest called her name from across the waves.

Evren waited until another contraction had passed, then plunged into the sea. The weightlessness was a boon to her aching joints; the swim might have almost been pleasant had there not been lightning streaking across the sky ahead of her, or dread clasping its cold tendrils around her heart. Evren did not fear childbirth; she'd been through it enough times that she tackled it head-on, as she would any straightforward obstacle. Knowing what awaited her in the Forest, however, was a different story. The problems she had created between Persephone and herself were not simple or straightforward, and neither did they have any obvious solutions in Evren's mind. They were, collectively, an enemy that she could not pummel into the dirt with her hooves, which was the only kind of enemy she feared to face.

Just as she was mere minutes from her feet touching sand, a pain like fire shot through her pelvis, draining the strength from her body. Evren stiffened in the water, and for a few moments the only thing keeping her afloat was the generous buoyancy of her swollen brown belly. The tides shoved at her, stinging her nostrils with salt, and a loud crack of thunder split the sky overhead. Moments later, the deluge began: so ferociously heavy that the island of Luthien was obscured as though a veil had been pulled over her eyes.

If any gods existed, their message was clear.

Evren reached the shore in a daze, her dripping white legs trembling as they carried her to the place in which she had given birth to Arkana and Sephine: a sheltered thicket deep in the heart of the Forest, soft underfoot with moss and so thickly canopied she could scarcely see the stars at night. But even it could not escape the rain; the moss was waterlogged and squishy, squelching when she stepped onto it, and it was littered with leaves and twigs that had been shaken loose. Evren was already sodden to the bone, however, and her shaking limbs gave her little option but to near-collapse onto her side and to ignore, as best she could, the debris that dug into her ribs.

As the storm raged, her pains grew sharper and more frequent, and the pressure built in her pelvis until she thought she would split open. She swallowed her groans until she could swallow them no more; she clenched her teeth until screams forced them open. She worried that Persephone would hear her until her rational brain retreated into a dark nook within her and she could think no more. There was only the storm, and pain, and the smell of blood.

Blood?

With the last of her strength, Evren lifted her head and looked behind her, expecting to see a foal. Instead, only two tiny legs protruded from her, and they looked strange: wrongly-shaped, somehow, and not in the position they should have been in.

Evren let her head fall back onto the moss and screwed her eyes shut. A sob rose in her throat, and she did not hold it back. It emerged as the high, thin wail: the sound of a broken, frightened creature who had nothing more to give.