Mṛgaśira slows ahead of him, her little ribcage heaving visibly even at his distance. He pretends, for a little while, that he is still a passenger in his disobedient body; he doesn’t give any sign that he sees her, only her footprints, swallowed whole by his much bigger hooves as he trudges along toward her.

When he can no longer sit still within himself, Fell’s eyes flick finally up from the ground to see that his desert mare’s ears have snapped backward. An angry Mṛgaśira is almost inconceivable to him, and his face flickers with alarm and shame. Though he is much taller, his head hangs low, and hers is thrown high, so that he manages to look almost meekly up at her when she speaks. His ears are splayed to the sides, submissive, indifferent. He looks down again.

It’s been three months, she says. I miss her, she says.

There isn’t a knife in his gut to twist; it’s more akin to a bear trap, clamping more determinedly around his heart with Mṛgaśira’s words. He winces. I know, he says; the words are in his head, and his breath comes out to give them a little whisper of sound, but his lips never even learned the shapes of words and it’s too late now, he’s far past the age where he might have puzzled out any language he could have uttered. He had never thought to try. So it comes out as little more than a sigh, a foggy silhouette of I know, and maybe she can understand it and maybe she can’t, but he’s beyond caring about being understood. Maybe that helps, even; in his desperation to be heard, anything he has ever tried to say has come out a garbled, frantic mess.

He’s not frantic now. Fell doesn’t bother trying to say I miss her too because he can’t bear to fuck that one up, but he desperately wishes he could. It’s obvious that Mṛgaśira would miss their daughter; their parenting roles had been fundamentally different, substantially and inherently unbalanced, with Mrgy carrying the vast majority of the weight. She had known Shvana. Fell had not, but he is consumed by the loss all the same. He wants to tell Mṛgaśira that he misses Shvana too, because what if she thinks he doesn’t? What if she thinks his only grief is only that of a stallion who has failed to keep every fragment of his bloodline alive to continue his legacy (to call it a legacy would be a joke, anyway)? He couldn’t blame her if she did. She had carried, birthed, and raised their two daughters. Fell had contributed little more than his seed to the creation of them, and a few precious moments of play and affection once they had arrived.

It’s too much for him to express. Even if he had words, Fell doesn’t expect he could wrench them loose from each other, clustered so tightly and lodged in his throat as he is certain they would be. So he just nods, breathless under the weight of the loss and of his failures — failure to protect their daughter and failure to mourn with Mṛgaśira after her death instead of just hiding himself away.

FELL

stallion. 16hh. black. marwari x. Rougaru x visurix.