ORIGIN

There existed a creature — dark and deep, where the mists crouched upon the rock and few might have thought to look — that slept without seeing, and curled a tender body beneath its obsidian reality without insurrection. It felt: the roar of rivulets down stone-side, the slick of its encasing, the beat of its own timid heart; yes, it was, and so it felt, time and calm and pleasure, but seldom did it do anything else, save for dream. It knew only wetness, and soft sighs, and, occasionally, the blink of heavy gazes. It drifted, in a sense, (for its flesh stayed still), and twined its entire being round the oceanic calm of its perceptions, content in its tiny planet of pitch and drowse.

And then the whole world heaved.

His eyes snapped — his? his? he? is he he? — wild and moist with curious fear; he understood too little to judge or misconstrue, prior reactions prodded by some instinctual force. Yet, deep sleep reaching its end, sentience stole across his psyche, and he understood that his entirety had shifted.

His cocoon splintered, the sharp sound a terror against the delicate shells of his ears. He became aware — dreadfully, dreadfully aware — of the press of his own limbs: the minute twitches, the shuddering gasps, the suspension of his body inside the stone's surface pressures. His chest rattles, blood sluggish and heavy, for now he knows horror and rebels. Coltish legs heft desperate kicks, begging for gravity, but only create spill. Ichor and oil leak from his world's wounds, and push force to splintered walls, unknowingly pursued by his despairing beats, the climbing arch of his newborn neck, the contact of fervent breast, his lungs filing with gasp. Faster than perhaps ought, his securities were destroyed.

And then he breathed.

He emerged an overflow; a dark passenger to the falling of fragment and thick liquid, nothing more; body limp and compliant in its tumble now that the air tasted strange. Body sleepy, and sad, he murmured a faint scream as he parted from cavern edge and into a shallow pool bellow. The impact birthed faint spray, flicking cold beads on his exposed flank, shocking him from nerve to core. He tasted and choked, and understood this gentle current not to be in likeness of his origin. Summoning the last of his energy, he gave a mighty, agonal kick under the pond, lifting his head above the pulling water. Exhausted, he leaned upon the right, silt and stone scraping into his hide. In that instant he had access to every sense — the final clicks of rock and tumult, the damp scent of water and earth, the feeling of mist as it parts from his gaping mouth. He shook and shivered and trembled, stunned from the slip, understanding truly only the cool liquid which swathed him in familiarity, and tided against his throat.

Tracing.
Retracing.
Backward.
Delphine's excursions through the Origin cavern was a spectrum vacillating wildly between vagrant deviation and a waltz to music that only she could hear. If before she'd been plagued with the sentiment of loneliness, now it was dismissed as nothing but an afterthought; a coping mechanism to guard against the sin of melancholia. The filly shifted from beside the waterfall, intending only to quench her thirst and finding instead a wonderment for the grand cascade. Where did the water come from? If Adeyemi or the owl had been with her, perhaps they could have flown to investigate the mystery but it'd been some time since she'd last seen the both of them. Again, her thoughts threatened to drift to a dark place but she was quick to distract herself. Standing with a start, the young Gembound trotted about Pisces, occasionally testing the small ponds with a gentle dip of her hooves only to watch as aquatic life burst forth, darting from the perceived danger. Delphine smiled with the knowledge that she would never take life, no matter how big or small.

A sharp crack splintered through the air and all at once, the energy shifted as it had in Eridanus. Something was coming. The birthing of new life. She felt it in the thrum of magic that pulsed in the caverns, in the way her own heart raced with building anticipation until her curiosity could take no more. Her eyes fluttered half-mast, reopening to her second sight where she could see, not corporeal forms, but their energies vibrant in their welcome of the child of the waters. Without another thought to spare, Delphine traced the origin of the sound just in time to witness a sable creature tumble from his gem into the pond below. A gasp pierced the space between them and the filly burst forth from where she stood, thinking not that the creature was so similar in semblance but that he'd perhaps hurt himself in his landing.

"Are you alright?" Delphine inquired and gently — oh so gently — she nudged the crown of his head.

Slowly did the thrum of his wild heart steady to something tame — and the weight of it began to command his breath and focus, outwards in, from sense to skin to something deep; the press of meat to nerve sharper than even the tang of petrichor that wafted against his flaring nostrils. Instinctively he knew his legs would be exhausted from wind running, and the sharp kicks against rock and tide, and so he began with the grit of sand against his flesh: its scrape, its rawness, and he, as he could not yet understand pain, revered in the physicality of it, how solid it felt beneath his tender bulk. Chill clung round his throat, and he delighted in that, too, giving a feeble toss of his head, which sent the droplets that clung to the wisp of his mane spilling down his back and into the pool. He murmured nonsense to the surface (though his throat were raw, from both the choke and his short scream of a bray; but endeavored, nonetheless, to answer the song of rain) and came to associate the tinge of silt with speech. He quivered, and loved, and understood the sleepiness of his submerged body to be home.

He gave another jostle of his head, cascading the last of the droplets down his neck, and breathed a happy sigh through his nose. An error, perhaps — for he respired only wet and brine, and rejected it readily through a wicked sneeze that pushed wavelets into the pool. Blinking, curious, the damp of his nose twitching, he huffed loudly, trying to replicate the action, but found it an impossible task, and so settled for an equine shriek of disappointment.

For that moment he perhaps believed himself to be the only thing in the world alive — he, and the gentle drift of ponds — but this were not a truth he could keep. There came the pounding of hooves to ground, so unlike the slish-slosh of his young world; so unlike he, himself, though even that notion would become false; and the vision of another, who murdered the distance between them in such a way he might believe in kith, and caused his heart to rush, his flank to ripple, his hairs to stand. He appraised her with a gentle cant of his head, sneaking occasional glances to his sprawled body, comparing the two in the depths of his psyche: their downy, onyx coats, the beat of her leg to ground and pool, the kindly breath of her sound. She begot touch, and he leaned to it with some cautious kind of compulsion, stunned and bemused by its inherent warmth, and the aching familiarity of it. He tried "Aaaaaaa. a-a-allllllll riiiiight-t," through the clog in his hitch, and perked in notable pleasure at the modest success. (In sooth he ached — with the cold seeping through his hide, and the drowse in his blood, and obsidian shards embedded into pulp, but, having known no other way, mistook it for correctness). Under the heaviness of her concern he demurred further. "rrrrrrrrright, right, right. Alllllll riiiiight. All right."

And, having heard the soft sweep of wings (and stilled instinctively, feathers stranger still than even gravity or warmth, and quite possibly a danger), the gentle, matriarchal coo of small kindnesses, he became dissuaded further with the idea of singularity. He shook himself from newborn, trembling meditations, and gaped with incredulity, for the differences between they and the newcomer were as vast as earth and sky: bright crimson to pure pitch, lithe youth to fulfilled promise. He turned the vapour of his gaze to his mirror, then back to the spindly creature which trilled happily from its perch — forward, back, forward, back, confusion turning to bemusement turning to guarded acceptance. Oh, he were a precocious soul! but startled more oft than not, and was prone to submissive modesty; and, just split from his encasing, had much to learn of body and speech, and felt torn between caution and fondness. "Heeelllooooo? Heeelow," he erred timidly, language thick beneath his tongue. "Hellllow hellow, All Right, Enna- Ennabe Vee." The colt paused, feeling for breath after the expulsion of his first words; but, feeling the matter important, turned and nudged the sable horse beside him. "Ennabe Vee All Right?"

@Delphine @Bevy

It was not too long ago when Delphine herself had been in the colt's position, floundering in the wake of a new world and strange creatures. There were many then to welcome her; sweet Magdalena, intelligent Booker, gentle Khloros, majestic Adeyemi, wistful Willow and powerful Usui. They had, each and every one of them, given her a warmth that could never be replaced. Taught her to love in ways she could not imagine because she did, oh how she did. In their absence, she found herself reaped of something good and whole, only mended when they would again all meet. In a way this dichotomy had made the filly as she was now, stuck in an indistinguishable space between unimaginable joy and empty melancholy. Wrought with times when she would smile when she thought on their playful banter to a more desolate reality where they were not beside her, Delphine played a precarious balance between two mindsets so jarringly different from one another. And this, this she did not want for the newborn.

She thought suddenly that she wanted to give him something consistent, something that was more than just touch and go. Torrid heat bloomed from her chest when the Gembound leaned, just so, into her touch. How very lovely he was even when he struggled to intonate the very word she'd lain at his behest. Her black lips curled into a small smile and she nodded in acknowledgment of his accomplishments, "Yes. Alright." Her attention shifted to take in his form, intending first to assess if he were truly without harm except that a glaring realization dawned upon her. The colt was exactly as she. Not quite sickly in a way that Khloros had been but healthy and filled with his onyx pelt and gangly countenance. How had she missed this before? Unabashedly, she glanced between them both and aside from their size difference, they were truly mirrors of one another. "Oh." Delphine mused unintelligibly, the only indication that she'd realized that perhaps, they were one and the same.

A small flutter pulled the filly from her thoughts, beckoning her gaze to the edge of the pool where a bird had landed. She remembered briefly when she'd first met avian creatures and how marvelous she thought them to be. Her smile softened considerably and her head lowered to greet the tiny Gembound. "Hello Enna Bevy. I am Delphine." The filly turned into the nudge on her side and for what was most certainly the fiftieth time to date, her heart fluttered with an affection too easily spawned for the newly hatched Gembound. "Yes, Enna Bevy is alright." She knew because she heard it in the bird's voice, an inherent maternal instincts and knowledge that came from the feathered being. "Should I help him from the waters?" The question, directed toward Bevy, sat between them in a way that was both indicative of Delphine's uncertainty and doused in a rhetoric because she knew that she should.

With tentative steps, the filly stepped into the water and shifted to stand beside the colt. Her head dipped once more to nudge his side. "Aren't you cold? Try standing." She would be there as his crutch should he encounter the same struggles as she, with knock-kneed grace and face-to-floor unions. Just once, she snuck a glance to Bevy because in truth, Delphine was apprehensive about her abilities to give the newborn what he needed in his first few hours of birth. After all, she herself was still a child albeit one that was wrought with too many sentiments both virtuous and base.

The freeze indeed seeped; it burrowed into his hide, and laid to rest beneath his skin, rivulets of rime and sick. Shivers, born not of terror or caution, rippled across the tender splay of his meat beneath the surface. It numbed the push of obsidian in his flank, the one contentment such a state could offer, but he knew his kicks and rears to be more feeble. Oh, his spirit had returned, delighting in the creature comforts of touch and companionship, but his breath had begun to waver, coat too thin and body too pure to handle the push and pull of the pool's callous waters. Sadness seized his heart, and spasmed in his psyche. "Delphiiii," he cooed, mindless, distressed; despairing that the thick and the roar had caused him displeasure, and that he knew so little of it, and that he did not understand why things had happened in this manner. He heaved another shake of his delicate head, and arched the curve of his neck, exposing his mane to the air, but it did little to dispel the discomfort that silently began to overtake him. "Coooold," he murmured, tasting the word, and found it a perfect fit; low, and keening, and depressed.

He clung to the memory of touch, and the two's assurances of rightness — their sound dimmed with concern, but not anything so fatalistic as his excruciating newness. It calms him, in flesh and soul, but also bemused; for his new world seemed unaffected by the mist and the waters, curious and strange. Perhaps because they pressed only to the faint, and came from places born not of meres, but earth and sky? He had parted from his wet encasement only to slip into a stranger kind of wetness; and, were he not so cold, he knew he would delight in it as he had before. Truly it was only the numbness that pricked at him, the deadening of his outward senses which had previously been a rapture — he had reveled into the icy shock of the pond's surface and depths, and shied only from its lack.

The notion cheered him. To "stand," (he murmured) would spill the cling of cold from his body, and carry with it the horrible paralysis of calmed reaction — he knew it, deep down in the low pulsing of his breast and beat. He curled his neck to Delphine's side, a simultaneous attempt to adore and steel both body and nerve, for she seemed quite balanced and tolerant. He studied her posture, and the splaying of her weight, and the press of her forces to all parts of her body, for some time; throat still; vapourous regard serious, and solemn, befitting the gravity of his situation. Tension sighed, filling the whole of his cavity with prelusive breath, and he kicked, and pushed, and tried to climb with the rise of his height in that same instant.

It was too much: the recline against horseflesh, the silt beneath his rear which slid when pressed, the exhaustion that seized the pathways of his body. He stumbled upon his fore, and could manage only a shaky lean, pulling his density forward and holding it above his abdomen. Yet still, the movement raised his chest above the water, and the heavy wash of pond as it fell away from him was a temporary relief, prompting a contented huff through his nostrils that was, perhaps, not entirely deserved. He eyed the droplets with interest, and pricked his ears to their gentle impacts, soothed by them in the circumstance in his defeat; yet melancholy lingered, in the droop of his withers and the disappointed tremble of his eyes. "N-n-not enough," he mumbled to the mere, pressing back to the sable warmth of his new friend with a heartbroken groan.

@Delphine @Bevy

Her attention flitted between Bevy and the colt but when words that seemed to drawl and crawl over itself sounded from beside her, Delphine found herself engrossed in the child's most minuscule gestures from the arching of his neck to his attempts at speech. She certainly could not recall herself being so graceful, at least not during her first few hours of birth. Then he shivered and spoke, her sentiments bowed to his cries. "Let's get you out of here." The filly whispered and try he did. Curiously, she watched as he struggled with his weight, working his hooves into the silt and water yet not quite catching the right footing or balance. It was a valiant effort and certainly better than anything she'd accomplished.

She felt the ghosts of a dull ache along her body from a time when she'd tripped and fallen except now, her wounds were not born from clumsiness but misfortune. Her gaze rested upon his sleek backside, untouched by the violence that lived in the nature of monsters and predators. Except Baratheon was no monster, simply a kind soul afflicted by a rage and bloodlust that would not be sated by logic. She would have been cruel to fault him for his sicknesses.

Wetted warmth grazed her side and Delphine escaped the enchantments of her mind, willing her consciousness onto the child who stood with his forelegs splayed. Not quite standing but coming as close to the motion of it as he could. She beamed with pride, knowing fully well how difficult the task was and finding that the fact he had not fallen face-first into the waters was already an accomplishment in and of itself. The filly nickered and announced exactly thus, "No, you did very well!" Her child-like enthusiasm bled through the brief instant of maturity and what was unspeakably a desire to be a good role model. It was not unlike watching children playing a game where they pretended to be adults except in this case, Delphine only wanted to give the colt what she herself thought she lacked. "Here, let me help." She added before stepping closer so that her body pressed against his, offering a stronger foundation than what his legs had to offer. The strength and balance would come but she imagined the chilling depths of the water were responsible, to some degree, for numbing his facilities.

With a tentative step forward, the filly faltered but slightly with the added weight. Oh how terrible it would be to fail now, so she spoke to ease her own trepidations as if the words would act as crutches in their verbal assault. "You know, when I was first born I tripped and fell on my face in front of five others. At the time, I don't think I minded so much but after watching you stand, it made me realize that I must have looked so silly." She prattled on, each few words accompanied by a step though if she stuttered or swayed, she paid no mind to it. "I even had two birds on my back! One of them was bigger than you," The filly directed the latter statement to Bevy, smiling all the while. "The other was about your size, if not a little taller and thinner. His name is Adeyemi. You would like them very much, especially Adeyemi." They were but a step away from escaping the pool, she saw the edge and in it was a victory to be hailed.

Careful in her attribution of weight, the filly took her first step out of the aquatic depths and once firm footing was acquired, she took another. If she stopped it was only to await the colt in his progress, wanting nothing more than to steal the shivers from his sable form.