“Nephew?” Maziel asked with a soft breath graced by surprise. She pulled her muzzle from where Suleiman was to instead bend back toward her sister, feeling the radiating warmth pour comfortably familiar from her body. “You have a child too?” She could hardly believe it to be so… Mariael had always had a complicated relationship with the idea of being a mother. Maziel felt herself warm through, hoping some of her sister’s trauma from her own relationship with her dam had hopefully been healed through becoming a mother herself. What was also not lost on Maziel was that the first time both sisters were carrying a foal, they did so at the same time, even with an unknown distance set between them.
“I do,” Mariael answered her, “Suleiman and I had our first boy, I-...” Mariael trailed off and Maziel frowned, wondering what it was she’d cut herself from saying. She could hear the tension that still lay in her sister’s tone and knew there was a piece of Mariael trying to work her way around or through Maziel’s decision. Maziel felt her heart sink slightly, wishing she could give Mariael what she wanted and take Charmeine to the Arch, but she couldn’t.
There was a comfort of having returned to the Bay that she could not explain. While her intention when she’d been chucked ashore here had been to only rest until she was healthy and then leave, Maziel soon found herself picking reasons to stay. Wandering the Mainlands, pulled away from Tinuvel after their father’s death had made her feel more and more lost every day that passed. Despite her unspoken promise to remain by Mariael no matter how cruel her grief and guilt made her become, it was not without sacrifice. The truth Maziel never wanted to tell her sister was how hard the last decade had been on her.
Now she knew Mariael was safe and now Mariael knew that she was safe. That should be enough. It would be enough.
“I would like to visit you both in the Arch,” Maziel agreed with Suleiman, though she’d pulled her muzzle from where Mariael was standing and looked off, somewhere she could smell the familiar musk of the quiet stallion who’d kept her and her daughter safe. “I’ll bring Charmeine, she must be the same age as your son…” She trailed off as her attention returned again to Mariael, curious what the boy’s name was.
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