My love has never lived indoors

[Dreamscar]

Hippogryph knows there's a reason she doesn't come to Pangea, she just isn't certain what it is, anymore. Her feet bring her here of their own accord - as they are wont to take her everywhere else - it happens without her paying a great deal of attention to the way the world turns from green and lush meadow grass to the dusty red sandstone of this world dredged out of the sea.

It's rare she bothers to see much of the world at all.

Which is just as well, since the darkness came, and the monsters that have always whispered to her from the shadows emerged at last for the rest of the world to see, with their teeth and their claws. Something about the way the thought of them wakes in her a reluctant memory. It hides in the swirling shadows of a mind that no longer fights the haze of morning-glory poison, its raven-croak voice lost to the whispers and sinister laughter that she is used to. The broken mare mutters, quiet, but fierce, her ears pinned back, her torn lips shaped into a furious grin, but when the first contractions hit her, the laughter that crawls from her raw throat is empty of anything close to emotion or humor.

The children are a series of failures. The only clear memory that sings like a silver thread in her brain is that she was born on a beach where bodies bloated on land and sea and a dark mare lay limp beside her, skull cracked on stone and lifeblood drunk thirstily by that gleeful, foul sand. Is this the correct way? Hippogryph turned out alright, but she has not been able to repeat the experience for her own children, and each pregnancy has ended in bad and strange things. The gruesome scar tissue wings etched out of her own flesh are the gift of the first. The red girl was also a gift of the first, and she died inexplicably when Hippogryph's hoof collided with her skull.

The first had been a monster, the second, a weakling.

And the third?

Sandstone is not sand, the wind is not the sea, the child will fail as the others have.

The words stain her cracked, bloody, lips with poison while the raven mare paces and paces and walks the deep canyons with sweat frothing white on her skin. When the filly slips form her at last, it is almost as if it has dropped from another mare because Hippogryph does not seem to take notice. She is circling, manically, and startles when the dark, squirming lump appears suddenly and rudely in her path. The mare squeals and strikes out with a forehoof but she misses the head on its outstretched neck, breaking free of the blue film of the sack.

Who put this child here?

Yellow teeth are bared in threat but the stubborn beast makes no attempt to remove itself from her way. It lies there and cries softly, a plaintive voice sure to draw predators and spies. Hideous, mewling, thing. A spray of fine sand tumbles from the ridge above. The Eaters come fast. Is that why she left? A shadow moves and Hippogryph rears her head back, wild-eyed.

They will eat you, Child. They will eat all of you.

How fortunate for her to have this distraction, then. Hippogryph turns away without another glance, a strange chattering filling her ears and the stench of old blood turning the canyon air thick.

It is not the Eaters, though, that come to claim the child. The snapped pieces of his old magic still cling to the dark mare's heartstrings and he feels the pull the moment she is close enough. He finds her, hissing her nonsense words over the child and considers killing her, but instead he lets her run, gaze drinking in the gift that Hippogryph has brought him. A sister. She squirms and shivers, wet with afterbirth, and the bloody stallion croons his shrill song, wrapping the babe in the warmth of love for him; for Dreamscar.

Her eyes are bright as molten silver and full of devotion when they find his and if his his cruelly beaked mouth could curve itself into anything but its predatory smile, it would remain the same. He grabs her small skull in the crushing grip of his talons until blood beads on her dark skin.

"Mine."

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