Meadow

He had been there. He'd been at his mother's side as he always was, the shadow beneath her hooves. He'd been nearly inseparable from his mother in those early days; he had been a dutiful son, and Sidika had spent far too much of her life believing she would never have a child of her own to squander a single second of her time with him. There were only two souls in the whole expanse of the world that could take him from his mother's side as a child: Sarisi and his father.

And both of them were gone.

Geçersiz tried not to remember much of that day. The shock of his father's form quiet and still beneath the unknown stallion, or the way that heartbreak had not rolled over his mother like a wave but crashed down on her like a tsunami, sweeping her off her feet and rendering her senseless. He'd watched as she rushed forward, watched as she was struck down. Watched as she'd fallen to the stallion's hooves, knowing the outcome she faced.

But it was not them he had meant to ask for. He knew where his parents would forever lie, their bodies left to rot in the unforgiving Salem heat. But of Sarisi? And of the Arab clan? Of Corona and Jyeshtha? Unable to read his intention through his poorly worded question, she only echoes the things that he knows.

Overcome, he went silent, his eyes squeezing shut with grief. In the days that followed, he had tried to lie to himself in the hopes of softening the pain, but he had never been able to forget the finality of it. Sidika had known what was going to happen, and she had chosen it anyway. She'd chosen to follow Maslakhat into the great beyond, to leave him to fend for himself.

No amount of white lies could mask that pain.

"It is okay," he says firmly, smoothing his mother's mask back over his face. It was an ill-fitting one, barely covering the pain in his eyes and doing nothing to still the quiver of his lip. A part of him felt just as betrayed by his mother's choice now as he had then, but trying to unpack all of this to a mare that had only come to him for a light conversation seemed improper. However, as much as Geçersiz might lie to himself, his mother had not allowed him to lie to anyone else.

"I've known of my parent's fate for some time." His voice was soft as he raised his gaze back to Shenzi. "There is no need for you to apologize for something neither of us could control."

His gaze ducked away from hers, and he felt his shoulders stiffening in the awkward silence that followed. He wasn't sure what else to really say, as everything that rose to mind felt inadequate. Eventually, he drew in a breath to steady himself and then peered quickly at her. "Where, um," he cleared his throat and squared himself again, as if he hadn't just been on the verge of crying like a child in front of the fierce fighter. "Where do you live now?"