Grown up talk was boring. After stashing this piece of knowledge safely away the filly hung around her parents, quiet and unassuming, until nobody was looking at her anymore. Then she quietly slipped off, eager to explore the vastness of the world without any worrying parents to hover over her. The looming mountains and watchful sentinels frightened her, so she steered her path away from the hidden vale with its steaming basins and cold-eyed people.

Instead she headed into the vastness of the open plain. The wind was growing warmer by the day now but snow still lay thick and white, glittering beneath the light of the sun until her one functioning eye stung and watered. It was cold, but no more than she was; small, frail and inexperienced though she was, the girl was far better equipped to be out on her own than many others.

Still. It was further to walk than she had anticipated, and soon her feet were aching quite as much as the growling tummy. She had never been hungry before. It was an altogether undesirable condition, and she had already decided to turn back to mother and the boredom when something in the distance caught her eye.

It was like a crust of snow crumbling, but not quite. Slightly more like a milk bubble bursting on her lips, but bigger and far more impressive. And it sorta wasn't just there but everywhere, but it was like it had started there over where the mountain suddenly turned red, and the filly didn't know if she saw it or felt it, but it was so impressive that her legs carried her over in a hurry. It took a while; she was not a fast runner, and she had this persistent cough that made her short of breath and caused her ribs to ache and stab after a while, but stubbornness and wild curiosity pushed her onwards, even though hunger gnawed on her insides and mommy was very very far away now.

Not until she was very close to the red-colored mountain did she slow down. With heaving sides and sweat freezing to ice in her woolly coat the young girl stared in awe at the forest, intrigued and concerned and scared, but mostly impressed. It was really very red, the very same red that had been dripping from mother all the way across the snowy plains. It was in the looming trees, in the rushing water, in the very air it seemed. Every muscle in the tiny body ached and protested as she stepped in beneath the heavy canopy, her breath was short and had a horrible whining to it. But she bit back her tears, determined to be brave.

Against the bleeding backdrop of darkness her frosty white coat appeared to almost glow. The snow disappeared around her feet, replaced by moss and barren earth and the kind of sickly vegetation that can thrive even without sunlight; she wondered whether snow had ever fallen on the pathless ground, a trailing side thought that disappeared from her mind even as she stepped out, fairy-like and innocent, into the clearing where the others were.

There she stopped and curled the long tail around a leg, wide eyed as she took in the scene. A stallion near the pool of the rushing waterfall looked injured and tired and rather wet. Her eyes went directly to him because out of all the others, among all the vibrant coats, the strange glitter and swirl and glow his monochrome figure and lightning shaped horn was by far the most imposing. A similarly colored figure, smaller and rounder and younger looking was hurrying over with something in her mouth, and she too was different from the rest. The confusion lay as thick as the acrid taste of electrical discharge in the air, but the two of them alone seemed relatively calm. Like they knew what was happening, and could answer questions.

Erthë started forward again, timidly weaving her way around this person and that, passed two approaching young colts who looked like they were having fun, until she came up close to the black-and-white ones.

"Are you okay?"

She spoke the words confidently and rather more eloquently than her age called for. They were the ones she knew best, because Mother and Father and Badger had asked her that many many times on the long journey, and she had heard father ask mother the question too - and the big injured one looked like he really needed to be asked that, so she put extra effort into it. Momma would have praised her if she'd heard it, Erthë was sure of it.