[open] Where I'm from, the rivers run red (Myrna)

[Cascadia]

The painted mare follows a short way behind Myrna, into this new unfamiliar land. Her eyes taking in the scenes surrounding her. She smiles as she thinks of what sort of home her and Wynters could have. Rolling hills, that must be a vibrate green in the summer months, currently tipped with the frost of winter. Although the air here hardly feels like the freezing cloud of what winters back home were like in that barren infertile land she grew up in, where hardly anything grew.

As she nudges her foal gently, the action the only things keeping the exhausted foal going. Of course Myrna had offered to stop of either of them got tired but the thought of them being somewhere relatively safe when night fell kept her urging her foal on, perhaps the wrong decision but it was done now and she couldn't change the past. Her foal would be safe to drop into the deep sleep she so desperately needed here, and maybe she herself would be able to let her guard down a little, at least enough to rest and recover some much needed energy.  At least she hoped that was correct. She hadn't sensed any deceit in Myrna and so she had chosen to trust the other mare, or at least as far as one could trust a stranger.

The black and white foal was only still moving due to her mother's insistent nudging. Her head dropped so low it was a wonder she didn't fall over herself in her exhausted state. Her bleary eyes only just able to see in front of her, it's a good thing her mother was also steering her trajectory as she could have easily walk into anything in her path.

[Viszla]

The palomino mare follows the familiar route home, choosing the ways easiest for small and tired hooves. By the time they reach the familiar rolling hills that begin to delineate the Gates from the land around it, the little foal is nearly sleepwalking.

Myrna leads the way to a shallow overhang at the base of one of those hills, carved out by some long extinct ancestor of the little stream that chatters quietly beside them. “It tends to rain overnight in winter,” she explains, gesturing to the offered shelter, “This’ll keep you dry. In the meantime, I need to go find Ravin and Luvi, who I’m sure are driving their grandparents mad by now.”

The palomino mare looks overhead at the evening sky that is quickly becoming star-spangled, then at the last fading glowing of orange on the western horizon. When she turns back to Cascadia, she offers the other mother a warm smile.

“We’re usually awake too early, and hanging out in the meadow that’s a little ways downstream.” She wants to reassure Cascadia that she doesn’t intend to lead her to a new place only to abandon her, while also giving the exhausted mare and foal time to rest, and herself time to fetch her children from any trouble they might have entangled themselves in.