There is no worse time in life when you must reconcile with yourself. Compared to any other argument, one you keep inside your own ears, your own lips, your own thoughts, it is the loudest, the strongest, the hardest. Like any true reflection your body moves against itself, and so too does your mind. Where one glimmer of hope reigns, a cruel shadow twists. For every reason, an excuse. Every truth, a lie.

The only benefit was the inevitability of the discussion.
Ampere screamed.
She couldn't run from this. Not yet at least.

The contraction rippled through her loins like a gator in a swamp; savage. Her flanks heaved in tempo with her widened nostrils, ones which quivered with each rapid breath she sucked in. Feverishly she threw her gaze about, the wash of blue, normally alive with emotion and life, was dimmed with pain and regret. She searched wildly for shelter, hobbling on her swollen, stiffened, aching legs. Even if she hadn't been a warrior, instinct drove her towards safety, as much for herself as the child she carried with her. This would be their weakest moment (hers had been months prior, really), debilitated by this wretched gift of life.

Another wave of agony wracked the blue mare as she stumbled through the desert sands. Closer, she whispered in desperation to herself, recognizing the time that was slipping past her feathers. Furiously she grit her teeth, digging for that internal fire that so often raged in a heated moment born of passion and outrage. It burned somewhere inside her bones, dull and quiet beneath the overwhelming heat of shame and pity. Still, it was enough to get her moving again, gaze still jerking side to side, lips cursing the desert under her breath. A wiser mare might have already chosen a spot and lingered near it when the time drew near. Though, perhaps it wasn't wisdom, maybe it was give a damn. Ampere was fresh out of those when it came to this deed.

Huffing, puffing, she staggered to a thin shrub just as another roil of misery ravaged her muscles. Again she cried out, eyes rolling amid their whiter edges as her head swayed and bucked against balance. Ampere leaned forward, her knees catching her, and then the sand. Distantly the roar of the ocean could be heard, her travels and her senses taking her to the far reaches of their south western border - it was not as patrolled as the north eastern area where the land bridge was. She could find respite her.

Thankfully the Mother of Companions (not of foals, to be clear), was not a maiden this time around, and was more fit than before with all the training her position required. Although it did nothing to relieve the pain, it definitely shortened the duration of it.
With another gut-wrenching bellow of torture, tail thrashing furiously, wings slicked tight against her body, neck straining, an egg was released from her rear.

Ampere breathed heavily. Sweat clung to her neck fastidiously, attracting the sand she nestled amongst. Yet she smiled, because it's over.

Or so she thought.

[NPC that's been pre-arranged and Tandavi please! Order isn't particularly important, but then I'll post again.]

Tandavi</style>
i'll light a fire in your new shoes</style>

It's an instant, a breath, a blink - and it's gone.

The egg is gone.

Blue eyes flash like lightning in the sky from beneath black lashes weighted with weariness. Ampere sees only a dull blur, hears only a drawn out screech, and her first instinct is to run and save herself. Her heart scatters like birds from a tree, racing into her throat, pushing out her oxygen and her rationality. Her wings flare, an illusion of defense and strength while she cowers beneath, limbs shaking with the failed attempt to rise and move.

Then it's over. At least that part is, because directly following another scream is wrenched involuntarily from her as another pulse of pain cascades within her flanks. Terror grips her like ice in frostfall creeping in at night. She thinks for a moment the beast has returned (because why had it come if only to leave?), but there is nothing she can do, and so she sinks into the fate served for her. She knew death was to come, she had just not expected it like this.

Another breath, more blinks, several heart pounds later, and Ampere lives. He lives too, encased in the wet, shiny egg that has rolled from beneath her tail just as Tandavi arrives, Dancing over the ocean of Fire that is their desert home. Soaked in sweat and stained with panic, Ampere had never been more grateful to see an 'enemy' before. In this moment they were sand sisters, an ideology that transcended whatever past transgressions rifled between them, binding them in blood crafted with the heat and light of the Sun God.

This was what she'd been looking for her whole life; the comfort of love not in the folds of a busy mother, not in the tales of an unknown father, not in the caress of a lustful stallion, but in the tested strength of a family. How had she been so blind as to never recognize it before? All those nights spent cold and alone int he wilds, all those days recklessly wasted on the wind... and all the while what she needed had been here, nestled in the dunes.

"Protect it!" she called out, her voice unsteady and wavering as it shuddered from her thirsty lungs. There was strength to it though too. It was not a force audible in tone alone, but the weight of the words on her tongue, in this moment, they were fortified with a powerful change in this Mother. She could not leave this egg, not now. That creature, whatever it was, could easily return. Ampere had never intended for her eggs to die, she just didn't necessarily want the responsibility of ensuring they lived either.

She had always thought death was it's own kind of freedom, the hot brand of LIVE FREE OR DIE inscribed on her youthful tongue which was so eager to mark others. She would have willingly given herself too, if need be (still would), but she was no so eager as she had been even a year ago. She had found things worth living for the longer she endured her existence, and as such felt the same desire to protect those traits and the life necessary for them in others. Live free certainly, but you had to be alive first. Could she truly say leaving the egg with nothing but the warm sands for a bosom would be enough? Once she had thought so, because it suited her, because it was easy. Yet how many tales had she heard about companions where a life inside that egg was saved? Many, she thought stubbornly, though in most cases it was the egg itself that needed rescuing, not the soul inside. Animals born in egsg frequently received little care, other than birds and foals (as in her case). Although she was quickly realizing all companions came in eggs, regardless of their lineage - which was not all together strange to her given her birthing strategy.

At any rate, her egg was safe, or so she had thought of the one she'd left in the wake of shame and fury, her shadow the last thing she watched recede on its shell a year past. What happened to that egg? she wondered cruelly, the question a stab against her already bleeding heart. Even if the shell had not fallen around a dead body, how long had it survived outside of its calcium armor? She knew, even then, that it would crave the pale river of milk just as any other foal did.

She pinched her eyes shut, blocking out the blinding oval that lorded over her.

Ampere shivered with exhaustion, content to lay back against the bed of granules and the meager shade of the weedy shrub. Her nostrils flared, prickling with the stench of blood and birth, salt and anxiety. This egg is not safe, desperation as a plea among her tumbling thoughts, madness trying to reason with paralyzing fear. The monster could return any moment, and she could do nothing, too drained to even summon a spark.

"Tandavi," she croaked after a bout of silence, lashes stirring the red dust.
Her willpower flared, a final attempt at abandoning her duties while survival ran like fire in her blood, demanding her to rise, to run. "Watch it..." she said weakly, though not from the physical aspects.

Ampere stood unsteady before the girl of fire and justice, unable to look her in the eye for what darkness she harbored in her heart. For all the illumination that lightning brought, so bold and fast, it was born in gloom and shrouded storms, brief and erratic.

Tandavi</style>
i'll light a fire in your new shoes</style>

Like snow melt in the first wash of spring, Ampere's fatigue thawed beneath the heat of Tandavi's healing touch. The warmth of her gift gently stitched back together torn and ripped areas too tender to mention, and filled her bones with the light of the Sun God's strength. She wasn't sure why then she still felt so weak.

A season past when she'd borne the weight of the golden crown upon her 'brow, Ampere had quivered with fear the the unknown of it all. Hardly a sheltered filly, she nonetheless balked at paths her hooves had yet traveled; not in any physical or literal sense of the phrase, and she'd certainly gone through every emotion imaginable fifty different times (a day). It was responsibility and expectations, or rather the potential to fail at them, that chilled Ampere to her core, filling her with a dread that left her as tharn as rabbits under the shadow of a hawk.
Leadership she had never done before, so she ran.

In an exasperating conundrum of contradictions which could only be labeled as mortal, Ampere had never had qualms about hurtling herself headlong into fights, whether trained or not, capable of victory or not. She'd always had an affinity to the art of war, but her record was only stunning for it's recklessness, not her trophies; as if failure in the fighting ring were something different - a rose by another name.

You don't get good at something until you do it though, fighting and leading included.

For all of those traits, being a parent was just as applicable.
Motherhood swooped upon Ampere like a ravenous raptor.

The Mother of Companions visibly squirmed beneath Tandavi's gaze, a rabbit kicking for its last breath beneath the strong talons of its death. The Fire Dancer's words were the killing blow; Ampere swayed. For a long while her execution was carried out in stagnant silence, the listless blue of her gaze tumbling like a weed over the dusty horizon. She could smell it again; the promise of failure.

"What if I can't do it?" she whispered at last, so afraid her chest tightened with the sensation and forced the words out of her dry throat like a gentle squeak. Terrorized by the domineering presence of the flame girl, Ampere panicked, her blue gaze slung like a bolt of raw electricity towards her stern features, words let loose like kicks from a balled up ass. "What if he grows up wrong, or he won't listen, or learn, or change?" A pause, eyes widening with a newfound horror as countless ones raced in her thoughts. "What if he hates me... because what kind of mother am I?" The storm died down into a faint breeze, her gaze adrift once again.

"It's not so easy, to just pick up a life and be in charge of it. Everything I do wrong... could ruin him." The similarities of child rearing to companion bonding were lost on Ampere in the moment, though she'd recognize them again in another time, another argument. Maybe that was the seat of her dislike for both roles - it meant she could fail, it meant someone was in control of someone else, which inherently conflicted with the wild ideology of freedom she clutched so feverishly too, despite never knowing the cold kiss of chains.

Ampere wanted to say Tandavi would be better for him. More motherly, wiser, stronger. She didn't though, and she didn't leave either.

Tandavi</style>
i'll light a fire in your new shoes</style>