It was an attempt to fill a void, and already she is starting to regret it. It won’t be her first child, but she had little to do with the first one and she doesn’t know what to do with the second one. Her belly is swollen and walking is strangely laborious, nothing of her usual grace and careful precision. Now, every step is a job, a task, the pregnancy seemingly unending. She has no home and so she has ensconced herself in the forest, mourning the loss of her strange (and possible imaginary) quest-family as she faces this lonely life once more.
Part of her wants to go back to Aranea, to Magnus, to the other real friends she ever had; but she knows they aren’t even in Tephra anymore. If they had been in Tephra when she went looking, perhaps she would have had the strength to resist the call to dreaming that had led her into the stupid quest in the first place. (And oh, god, she misses him. Misses him like she imagines an amputee might miss a limb).
The baby had been an impulse idea – start a family to make up for all the families she has lose or never had. But the bigger it grows inside of her, the more she wonders if it will be enough – with no father in the picture, does it even count as a family?
It’s too late to change her mind. She knows these pains are labor.
At least this one is quick – the first had been a slow, (stupid slow), slow process. This one is an hour or so of pain and then – bam!- a kid. Another filly. Sloene cleans the girl carefully, removing all of the gunk and birth residue and then guiding the filly back to nurse, trying her best not to hypnotize the child into doing what she wants. The girl is pretty enough, a dark gray baby color that could shed out to a true black or into a gray like her dam, and she has Sloene’s gray eyes. Honestly, the little mare is glad the girl isn’t blue all over like her sire, though she still eyes the iridescent blue blaze on the kid’s head with some censure.
Sloene, a mother. And this time, she’s responsible for the kid and is supposed to keep it and raise it.
She’s not sure how.