Nothing had been okay since she’d returned to the Beach.
Often, she found herself wishing she hadn’t returned. Wishing that she had simply been left to be consumed for the rest of eternity.  She often thought of attempting to use the ability that had come back with her to purge her own mind of the pain, but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

Coward.

She fluctuated between extremes of anger and despair, stumbling through her own life without direction.  And when her sides began to swell she knew that this was not related to the parasite living within her.  No, this was a different type of parasite.  And she knew with the curse that had been forced upon her in the afterlife, that the child she carried would likely never draw its first breath.  But there was still that traitorous flicker of hope that kept her going.

The journey beyond had left her with mental scars, but physical ones as well.  While the wounds had healed, the scars glowed an eerie green where the hair failed to knit over flesh. Another reminder to others that she was different. 

The majority of her pregnancy was spent in isolation.  She was not good company as she grappled with this new reality.  She felt unsettled.  More dangerous, perhaps, than she ever had.  But when the unmistakable pains of labor began, the only place that provided her any sense of comfort was home.  So she found herself at the edge of Pangea, where the land transformed from lush to barren.  She settled herself beneath a scraggly tree and nestled in the sparse grasses as the waves of pain rolled over her.

She welcomed the pain.
And when the pain finally ceased, she could hardly bring herself to look at the child - the rotting mass of bones and flesh. The exposed bones.  The eerie green glow.  The unnatural stillness.  She couldn’t bring herself to touch the child.  She assumed, in a haze of pain, that her child was stillborn - just as the door had promised.

Had she known the child lived, perhaps she would have erased the memories of her birth from the child’s mind.  However she assumed no child who looked like this could possibly live.

This was her curse, after all.

”I’m so sorry, Isotope,” she choked out, as a strangled sob finally ripped free of her throat.  And with that the mare forced her feet beneath her, stumbling as she went, leaving the body of her firstborn on the border of her homeland - surrounded by radiation-bleached grasses and eerie green blood.