this isn't mischief
The trickster has never understood a woman’s desire to have children. He supposes it would be something awful (carrying a parasite that feeds off your own body for months on end, only to suffer through hours of painful labor, and then lug around the little nipple-sucker until it grows balls) and he can’t quite see the victory in caring for a creature like a child. He enjoys the part that shoves life into the mother’s womb, but after that the payout is (in his just and righteous opinion) shorted.
It seems the mother that comes growling into the meadow has similar thoughts as him. Her barrel rolls and heaves with the tides of swollen waddling, and her eyes are crackling with the fire of frustration. There is a dark sense of life in her eyes and the trickster’s mind plays up with curiosity and excitement. He hasn’t been up to trickery since coming back to Beqanna and thoughts of starting again pulse through his brain like leaping fish.
The pregnant mare seeks shelter under a large tree and the wild weather that had started upon her arrival settles into something softer. Hail pricking at his back changes into white, fluffy snow. Although autumn has finished, the trickster stills huffs a sigh of dismay to himself. Winter is his least favorite season (the frigid temperatures stir an ache in his bowlegged forelegs – legs that were broken and then hastily reassembled – and cause his lungs to feel stripped and burned from the air) and he would be much better off without it.
Mischievous fingers of illusionism creep toward the stowaway in the mother’s womb. Although the trickster cannot control the baby fully, in a sense he can stimulate some sort of scene to encourage it to move a certain way. His magic stretches into the muscles of the child’s developing legs, sending faux twinges of restlessness through its body. Oh, how the child should need to stretch, to kick its legs into the hard lining of its mother, to wiggle its body around for prolonged moments until the swollen mare turns her frustration toward her growing baby.
The trickster, stepping across the white dusted ground, heads toward the mare and stops a polite distance away from her (sure, sometimes he can be a gentleman, when he wants to wear that mask). “Having some regrets?” he asks her, smooth tenor voice coming out in a generous slide.
lokii
this is mayhem