Yael does not have the vocabulary to describe the mixture of terror and fury she feels at the prospect of giving birth alone. Each day is worse than the last, and each day she grows more certain that Zurok will not return, and she will have to deliver this stupid giant baby all by herself.

How had the two of them even produced such a goliath of a foal? She is much taller and less fine-boned than her mate, but she is not enormous, and Zurok is of whip-slender built from his Arabian blood. Even so, Yael is almost wider than she is long, and her knees and hooves ache and protest with the weight of the damn thing. Part of her loves it unconditionally, no matter how badly it hurts her to carry it, but part of her has soured and curdled from her fear, and that part of her has grown to resent the child in Zurok’s absence.

It is at the literal last second that Zurok’s call reaches her from across the Bay, coinciding with the first gentle pang of a contraction. Yael is hit with a wave of relief, euphoria, and rage all at once, intensified by the pain of that first gripping pinch around her middle. Oh, this is going to be terrible, but she will have to get through it one way or another.

Lurching forward, Yael ignores the intensifying waves of labor pain and hobbles as fast as her dark legs will carry her toward the sound of Zurok’s voice. Her anger aids in her journey, dulling the pain and fueling her pace, and she lets out a shout that is much closer to a roar of challenge than any sort of greeting.

Despite her white-hot first steps, by the time Yael reaches Zurok, she is a fearful and unsteady mess of pain and relief. Her face is twisted with physical agony and the betrayal of Zurok’s disappearance, and she buckles to the ground before him, lathered and panting. "What hap – " she begins to demand, but her voice is cinched by a contraction so strong it halts her breathing for a moment and silences her entirely. Her anger, at this point, is forgotten, dissolved in the sea of pain that envelops the tall bay mare. She attempts to look up at Zurok, to assess his wounds even while her own body feels as though it is ripping in two, but her vision is clouded and her attention refuses to obey. Instead, her eyes roll back, and she submits to the delivery of this monster child of theirs, retreating into herself to escape the pain.

When she comes to, it takes a long moment for Yael to figure out what she is seeing. There is not one enormous foal curled on the ground beside her as she expects, but a pile of sunset-red fur and limbs and faces that belong to two entirely normal-sized babies.

"Oh, god," she hisses, too exhausted to give much voice to the whisper. She looks tiredly up at Zurok, her lips pulled crookedly in a half-grin of delirious humor. "You’ve got a whole welcoming committee."