…So I walked over to him as he beckoned me over, the slope of my shoulders stiff and frozen and my spine painfully straight; my steps were still awkward from the blood on the bottom of my hooves. A sense of dread was steadily stealing over me; the memory of our previous meeting was still fresh in my head—but more than that, there was another recollection that was making its obnoxious way to the forefront of my mind’s eye. Back when I was properly tiny childish, calling for my Ma so I could suck from her tit—coming across a whole group of strangers, except one of them was my Pa and no one thought to tell me—and all around me, it seemed like, crows were falling from the sky, dark as shadows and neatly, perfectly dead. I had been scared shitless back then—I never made sense of the wild fear that I had had, but I could tell that something awful was happening and I had wanted to get the hell out of there as fast as I could.

I had the exact same feeling now—except my ass was bigger and my shoulders were sturdier and ready to hold the weight of much more responsibility. I couldn’t just run.

Did I forget what he wanted me to do? Of course not—hadn’t I spent so much of my time (heh) looking for Mesec? Well, okay, looking for both Ma and Mesec, that was true, but the effort was equal for the both of them. It just so happened that Ma proved to be easier to find—I hadn’t even caught a whiff of Mesec’s starry butt anywhere, at any place, at any time. It wasn’t until I had left the earth behind on a baller floating cloud that I finally found my half-god sibling.

Pa asked me what I had found—and I shook my head jerkily, irately, as though a fly were whizzing around my ears. “Not a damn thing,” I said through gritted teeth, hating what I was saying but saying it anyway, because lying wasn’t gonna fix anything. It just sucked being a failure. “I tried looking for Br—for Mesec, like you said. He wasn’t anywhere though, Pa. He—I couldn’t even smell him…” I glanced back at him—at Mesec, my Bro, the one who I had grown up beside, the one who had led me out of all sorts of screwed up situations.

Unbidden, in my head, there came the image of the cold mare’s lips again, and the dark clump of hair she had stuffed in her mouth. I shook my head again, irritated and frightened and ready to do something, anything to make this bullshit come to an end…