The crashing of the waves and the quiet babbling of the little shadow at her side is all she hears in the early morning hours. The sands are soft beneath her hooves; a slow paced walk is all she can muster from aching limbs that tremble against the cold winds, despite the fact that spring was in the air and thing’s should have been warming up, but the bay she’d found herself in was rather chilly still.

Terrible shame on the not drowning

The voices, yes they were there still, bitter of her not losing her life crossing the ocean while heavily weighed down until days earlier. Her eyes had fallen on the shifting waves a moment, the reason the voices were there pestering her to leave it all behind. They had berated her over the seasons, for the growing of her petite form that gave way to her little carbon copy that followed so closely at her heels. “I can swim,” she haughtily reports back to them, huffing and sliding her gaze away to her other side to look into the mirror image of her own face, the only difference being that it was a male she’d born. “Can you swim?,” she tried her best to say these words slowly, for he was still learning and given how sporadic his mother already was it wouldn't surprise her if he found faults in her teachings. Nesrine doesn't wait for his answer, stopping where they had trudged along to and face the waves that rise up the beach to wash over her hooves. She didn’t realize she’d wandered so close.

Yes, take him, let us have him

“No,” she shook her head, suddenly spinning around in a whirl of gray and kicked up sand to push and shove at the colt with her suddenly lowered head, aiming to herd him back up the beach and onto the safety of the grassy plains that awaited them. The shadows are there again in the corner of her eyes, threatening to take her sight from her, golden brown hues frantic with the way they stare down at the terribly fragile foal below her. It’s a miracle she hasn’t accidently killed him herself as of yet with her sudden spurts of hysteria.

Nesrine lifts her head to frantically call out over the landscape, this unfamiliar land so strange to the new mother who knew not of where to go other than to a watery grave and only vaguely could she remember that this was where the child’s father was supposed to be. Fate was lucky this time washing her up here in time for her son’s birth, but at what cost?