for one wild moment; any

[Scalped]

Scalped has loved her foals as best as one like her can; she carries them to term, pushes them out into the world, nurses and weans them all in a year’s time or less and encourages them to go off on their own. She has raised her own foals’ foals - especially her careless indifferent daughter who seems to always manage every other season to find herself in foal with something strange and rather unbearable to raise - like the coyote-shifting colt and the levitating filly, both of which had been left in Scalped’s care.

The medicine hat looks towards the same direction the black mare had come from as another mare appears; it is not hard to imagine how they must control their sense of smell around her - she knows she stinks, that’s what happens when the half-dead mate with you and it makes it all rather unpleasant. Despite that, the golden mare smiles and Scalped smiles back at her. She looks up as the golden mare indicates for her to do so, “Please,” she asks politely and awaits the raincloud to do it’s work and wash her clean.

She laughs as the black tells her her name is weird but likeable.

For Scalped, that is a first and something she has never given much thought - if her name was common or strange, it was just a name, and not what she was originally called but it was often too hard to teach proper pronunciation to others when it came to her name, so she took on something from that era of her original birth and beginning.

“Thank you Kitra,” she says, liking the way the gilded black’s name slides across her tongue, foreign and silky. The black edges closer to share the impending downpour that will bathe them and when it comes, Scalped thanks the Queen with a grateful look and equally simple but effective words of gratitude. It is wonderful to feel clean again, but the birth pangs begin and the mare pulls away from the two of them with apologies and goes off to give birth in the lee of a dune.

To keep with the flow of time, she gives birth to Sinew and finds herself in foal that same season to a stallion of the Deserts. She grows fat with foal a second time and war looms but Scalped never feels less than safe inside the Deserts’ borders, not with Kitra and her mother around though she has taken to spending most of her time with the black mare when she is not off by herself doing whatever it is that Scalped does on her own - probably ponder her immortal existence mostly.

War ends; the Deserts teem here and there with pockets of life and Scalped gives birth again to a pintaloosa filly that has no idea she is immortal like her half-sister before her or her mother. The medicine hat mare doesn’t have the heart to rip this daughter’s ignorance to shreds and she has had to caution Sinew from doing the same, which caused a bit of a rift between the two but Sinew was more headstrong and strange than any of her foals had been thus far. Stoney was the exact opposite; sweet and tender and Scalped kept her sheltered in the Deserts, trying to preserve that innocence for as long as she could though she could not say why this daughter made her feel so strongly about that. Scalped was more the type to break them in at an early age to the realities of life - that it wasn’t always simple and quaint and easy.

Something about the little pintaloosa and Kitra’s presence kept Scalped rather unlike herself, or maybe it was all the years of immortality that were starting to mellow her. Either way, she liked to watch the way her spotted daughter tried to outrun her shadow across the sand and the way Kitra glided in and out, black and sometimes in bursts of lightning that seemed to come for a crackling angry-looking stallion. The war is over, or so it seems, and they have escaped relatively unscathed though Scalped knows better than that, but it seems to have untouched her and most of the Deserts here and for that she is glad - she has had her share of it, though sometimes, the faintest scent of blood on the air stirs something wild inside her and Scalped swings her head towards the direction of it, stretched tight and terrible in her readiness to run and fight but she takes a long breath and lets it ease out of her ever so slowly until her heart calms down in her scarred up breast.

These times, when she is at her gentlest, she seeks out the black mare and calls her name, not sure why she likes her so much - maybe that fire, that youth, both things that Scalped once had and does not any more. But as Stoney grows and leaves her mother’s side more often, the medicine hat finds herself spending more and more time looking for the gold-gilded black mare, shadowy and sleek, and all the things that Scalped is not - intriguing, mysterious, and beautiful though Scalped never begrudges her these things, she finds that she admires them, and has admired her share of horseflesh over the years but Kitra… ah, she was different.

ooc: kind of sped up the timeline a bit since Scalped's been pregnant for forever and has actually had two foals in that timeframe and that's my bad for taking so long to respond but I lubs Kitra and Yael, so I hope you two don't mind!