He crosses his heart and hopes, prays that he has saved this woman's life and not quickened her death. The sound of feet on snow makes him turn, suddenly protective - is it a roving carnivore, beckoned by the sound of distress and hungry for the meat of mother and foal alike? Badger doesn't know what he'd do if so. His own hide is so much more important, and he's no warrior...but he couldn't sit back and watch her be ripped apart! He turns, his big round rump towards the pegasus, putting his considerable girth in front of her, his heart fluttering like a hummingbird...

But it is no mountain lion or rogue wolf. It is a stallion, big and grey and horned, with an elk beside him. Badger steps aside, because he knows a father when he sees one. He watches as the stallion says her name, lowers his head to touch her, a lover's caress...a caress the gelding could never have. He sighs wistfully. How can he miss what he's never experienced? Perhaps it's simply the genetic, evolutionary urge to reproduce, an urge cruelly ripped away by a species that likes to play God. He will never see a wobbling foal with his markings take its first steps, he will never love a woman or feel the comforting embrace of his wife's grooming-bites as they lay down to rest together, and he will never grow old and grey knowing he has left his mark on the earth.

Dammit, he shouldn't have come here.

But if he hadn't, the mare might have died. That, and that alone, is enough to make the black forget his loneliness and allow himself to smile, knowing he's done something right for once.

The bleeding seems to have lessened, if only slightly, which is certainly a good sign. But then there's something else, something violently white - the man finds himself turning away, because it's so private and so personal and yet he's so curious. Then he glances back to the foal as it slips into a wet heap at the mare's tail, so small and white and fragile yet alive "Oh, your child is beautiful - congratulations." But Shadow is concerned, able to feel something Badger can't - the babe's cold flesh.

And there's no herb that Badger knows of to fix that.

The mare asks him, begs for his knowledge, but he doesn't have it. "I don't...I'm sorry, I've never seen anything like this before." He looks helplessly to the unicorn stallion. Is it magic? Hereditary magic, perhaps? "We need to get you and the foal to a magical healer, who might be able to tell you more." Because they have to have those here, right? It's an educated guess - they have flaming stags and horns and wings and flying dolphins, they must have healers! "This Basin, how far away is it?" Hopefully closer than the Throat, where he's from, and that's on the other side of Helovia. Quite how he and Vadim will get a badly bleeding mare and stone-cold-but-alive filly away from here, he hasn't quite worked out, but they'll cross that bridge when they come to it.