[open] daddy, wont you come out and play? [Cerva, former gates]

[Longear]

It is unfair to expect so much from them. She knows this. But to her it is like being asked to let go of the base things that drive her – to eat; to gratify her thirst; to draw breath; to seek warmth and propagate. She tries to understand the ways they change her world – for better, to be sure by far – and it comes to her, mostly, as nature intends it to. Like a creeping suspicion that she should be doing this, or that, and so she does. And these this-es and thats occupy her, wholecloth.

But she wishes they could climb, because she could feel all along that they were many-minded – by the grace of her Mother and his Coyote; the Seamstress and the Trickster. And they deserve to know.

She wishes they could walk longer with her before they fell, silly and sullen, to their knees and complain of achy feet or empty bellies.

But it cannot be helped. She always knew she would have to slow herself for them and for motherhood. She knew that the endeavors that had kept her ceaselessly in motion for so long would be all but snuffed out until they gained purchase on their gangly, little legs. So they only wander slightly, out across snow drifts (she is glad for the fat she still bares, her coat had not been readied for this), and she tells them of winter – why the trees are naked, what they would come become in the melt; she shows them delicate hoofprints in the snow as they cross the paths of winter-hungry deer.

She does as her mother did – lessons of seeds. And harvests. And deaths.

“Go on,” she lets them escape from her pull, though they never stray too far. They tumble and make patterns in the snow and giggle girlishly with each other.

She considers the mountain in the distance, purple and misty (somewhere, bodiless and alone on those spires, she waits), always watching for them – for the flash of bright white from Mauve’s tail (just like her own, a scut like that of common cottontail’s), a warning of danger. She might be missing her second half, but not all of the things she had taught her were gone. She does this, slowly wandering, a bit away, and then back in closer, until she sees the familiar (vaguely) bay form. Slowly, bodies and minds from Before are surfacing. She is happy to see most, if not all.

“Cerva?” she moves towards them – the proud boy nestled into her – “hello. I had wondered… a few of us met here after…” ‘Us’ seems a disingenuous word, she pulls it back. The Gates had hardly had a chance to be Longear’s at all. But, still, she had noted the gatekeeper's absence when Magnus had beckoned them all to a home, “who’s this, then?” She looks from the boy and back, smiling, keeping an ear on her own girls. She remembers Cerva as lithe and pretty, Before, having had none of the bigness that had made the pony so strangely round.