Oh.

Oh!

(You can say that much, can’t you? With your tiny little foal’s mouth?)

The world, so boring and black and full of nothing, is turned on its side suddenly! Where before, the only thing capturing your interest was following your sister upwards--it is all torn to meaningless dust, that interest of yours, as control of your body is ripped from you. You are thrown to the ground—you don’t notice the great grey shadow falling across your sister’s face, felling her as well. No, you only feel the pressure against your tiny bird’s chest, the way a great stone hoof presses into the soft, tender things inside of your throat. You feel the heaviness constrict you, bind you to the cold, hard earth. A bellow escapes from you, again, as though the hoof presses it from your minuscule body.

You learn something—isn’t it great? You finally get to learn a thing! And it turns out to be pain.

You learn pain.

Your body is aching underneath that hoof—that hoof, that hoof! Dark and grey and terrifying, a goliath, a giant squeezing your little parasitic soul back into hell. Your golden eye rolls wildly in its socket, and everything is a mess of grey—grey hair, grey hoof, grey feathers fluttering all around you, and there is screaming from Mother’s maw, sister’s maw, your maw—screaming, screaming, the world is screaming, and there is blood in a place you can’t see and all you know is pain.

…until it ceases.

The hoof disappears from your chest and neck. You begin to gasp, feeling the beating of your heart. That is your heart, y’know. You feel it now, pumping so hard and furiously, because you almost died. That pumping means life. You are alive, little Enyo—don’t you know?

You look up into the shadow that had brought you so much pain--you see nothing but grey, grey, grey, and it’s a monster you see, a monster who even has eyes that are grey too. And those eyes are looking into you, into you, so hard and cunning, so angry, angry, angry! Those eyes must know you shouldn’t have been born.

Ooooh, but I know who that is. Paaaapa.

He’s your  Paaaapa.

Him, with those grey eyes that are so furious with your tiny, tiny body. With that hoof that had come so close to snuffing the tender life from your breast.

But it didn’t!

Yes, yes, that’s the trick, isn’t it? That hoof didn’t crush you like it should have! No, it taught you a thing, didn’t it?

Pain.

And life.

And you look up into those eyes of his—