The filly was born without a sound, sliding silently onto the snow.  Her body was a perfect line:  her legs were tucked underneath her, and her neck was stretched out, reaching for the world beyond her mother's womb.  When she came to a rest, her eyes closed, she did not move.  She didn't know how to move, but even if she did, she wouldn't want to.  The snow was cold against her wet skin, so brutally cold; it encompassed her, offering her a frigid pillow on which to rest her fragile body.  She imagined that this was the end.  Her life had been wonderful, for the short time that she had been aware of it.  Her mother's womb had been warm and safe, and she had never experienced pain or fear there.

The movements of labor had startled her.  Her mother's belly contracting around her, forcing her out, had brought the first inkling of fear into her unborn mind.  She had tried to resist (perhaps that was why it had been such a long and difficult labor), but the longer she attempted to remain in her mother's womb, the more she found herself struggling to focus.  She grew weaker as time dragged on, unable to hold herself in anymore.  With on final shove, she found herself sprawling in the snow, wet and cold and afraid, suddenly assuaged by anything and everything around her.

The first thing she noticed was the feeling of the snow.  It was so cold that it hurt, and she could feel each individual flake as it melted against her hide.  It was the worst around her eyes and muzzle, where the skin was thinner and unprotected by the sparse hair that coated the rest of her body.  She shifted, searching for relief, but even that small movement caused tiny nails to rake her cheek.  She stilled, refusing to move, overwhelmed by the physical sensations gouging her tiny body.

The filly did not open her eyes.  She could tell that it was brighter here, wherever here was, could sense, in some small way, that shadows shifted across her lids, flickering along her retinas.  It would be too much to take in, even so bland a landscape as the snow-covered Falls.  Besides, she could hear everything that she needed to:  her mother's labored breath behind her, the roar of a waterfall cascading in the distance, the gentle plop of snow as it fell from a tree branch, her own fragile heartbeat pounding in her ears.  This, too, was a deluge of information, a barrage that brought naught but bewilderment to the newborn child.

It was too much.  It was all too much.  Her breath came in shallow gasps; if one did not look carefully, it would be difficult to tell if she breathed at all.  Every breath brought prickles of snow against her skin, a painful distraction from the immediate needs of a newborn foal.  Tiny puffs of vapor lifted from her nostrils, barely visible from afar, and still she lay, a silent sculpture, so perfectly still that she could be dead.

"Talk."