Whatever it is that she wants from life, Sloene hasn’t found it yet. And a part of her begins to doubt she will find it in a herd at all – but she is willing to give it some more time. It’s safe here, after all, and there is some company. Better here than out there alone, especially with Fall quickly coming to bear. If she is surprised that they have lived here for months together and not once passed ways, the girl doesn’t let it show on her face. She was not exactly social, after all, and it’s certainly not a small place.
“It hasn’t quite been a year, for me. I came in the spring.” If autumn nearly here, winter will follow. Her last winter she spent alone, and it’s not an experience she would care to repeat. For the winter, at least, Sloene will stay. She doesn’t let her mind wander – there are too many dark places for it to go – but when she lived amongst the space hoard she perfected the ability to say nothing, simply wait patiently and look interested. Somehow, even the only normal color in the group, she had excelled at blending and so that is what they had set her to practicing. There had been games, and fun, and Nera and Branka made excellent surrogate parents, but every game had had a purpose. Every visitor had told a story.
Nera hadn’t been raising children to go live content to do nothing in herds. They were meant for greater things. She’d said they all had a destiny – but she’d conveniently left out how they were to find it. Many of Sloene’s foster siblings could trade on their traits for favors, or on their heritage. The gray girl was nobody. Her father was a mystery to her, and her mother was dead. There is family who would take her in in a heartbeat, but she knows nothing of them. But then Syl speaks, and the girl’s ears flick to catch the words as if her attention never wandered. “Kreios found me in the Field. I was too old to stay with my foster family, but I didn’t know where else to go.” She smiles as if that wasn’t a traumatizing experience. As if the nightmares of being alone aren’t nearly as bad as the ones of waking beside a dead mother in a pool of blood. “He….um….” she shifts now, uncomfortable, flickering her gaze to Syl’s face and then away. “He’s not the kind of stallion that expects a foal every season, is he?”
She doesn’t know if she can be a mother. What if killing her family is something that wasn’t a one-time thing?