Meadow

He’s here. Her son is here - and Titania is furious.

Oberon had one job: keep Puck safe. She had squirreled her second colt all the way to the mainland to make sure he did not suffer his older brother's fate, stolen away from her by her enemies and raised on a steady diet of lies. Loki had been brought up as a prince, but had never known his mother's love. All the royal privileges in the world could not replace that. Not in a den of wolves known for eating their own young.

Puck was supposed to have the best of both worlds, so why the hell was he in this one?

Titania combs the Northwestern reaches of the Meadow, having followed his scent - the same as she remembered, save for the notes of mare’s milk replaced by a grown stallion’s musk - from the glade in which she’d first noticed it. She'd picked the secluded copse within the trees for her own resting place, finding it similar to the one she'd left him in, if not smaller, and because he was his mother's son, he'd had similar tastes. She skirts along the edge of the treeline now, following the less-than-subtle path he'd taken, strands of his multicolored tail snagged in half-snapped branches. On the deer trails, she bends to sniff at a set of fresh hoof prints; a flash of movement in her periphery draws her ears forward first, and she whips her head back up, heart racing with the memory of eyes, green and feral, always at her heels, seeking, seeking, seeking -

No. She reels back, snapping a twig as she does, and it sounds like the sickening crunch of bone beneath her hoof. Her breath rattles in her chest, but it does not fade to deathly stillness. Her lungs expand, and then contract. Her heart pounds in her chest.

She is alive, and Rougaru is nothing more than a pile of bones in the Desert, wiped off of this plane by her own doing.

That maelstrom of emotions barely registers across her features. Titania remains stone-faced for a moment, struggling to pick up the details of the horse silhouetted against the backdrop of the open Meadow beyond. She squints at first; it is late, and raining, and the darkness coupled with the scents of water and wet earth make it even harder, but when she finally realizes who stands before her, the star-browed mare smirks, her lips curled with sudden, steadfast purpose.

Fate is kind to her, indeed.

“Hello, you,” she coos to Rehoboam, her voice like sugared venom, the gears in her head already turning.