For better or for worse, she had brought her brother here. Even in the waning of the winter season, the southern lands were too warm for her comfort. Yet Kora was more concerned with the warmth at her center – a warmth within the swell of her belly that grew and grew – and as the months passed she felt certain it would eventually burn a hole right through her. Oh, but she knew exactly what this was. She knew what the threatening spring would bring.

Yes, she knew.

And yet the warmth is alien to her – the child she carries is alien to her. Were she still the Kora of old, things might have been different; back then, perhaps the idea of motherhood would not have seemed so foreign. There would have been nerves, of course, but surely the warmth would have been a welcome thing. Yet this was not to be. Whoever she’d once been had disappeared after liquifying into the sea. The very atoms of her existence were rearranged by the waters until someone else had emerged from the nothingness – the endlessness that left her forever changed.

It made no difference whether she had left the Isle for Leander’s sake or for her own. She had needed the distraction once she’d realized she was pregnant. Yet after all that transpired upon their arrival to the Pampas, Kora was desperate for some solitude; so when the opportunity presented itself, she slipped away. It was thus that the wintry mare found herself near the Sylvan border, a trail of snow falling at her heels – alone, save for the alien warmth that beats uncomfortably near her icy core.