That they were his was very apparent. She had known the first moment she looked at them; if she'd doubted, she'd known the first moment she looked at him. So his gesture of sliding a wing across his child only confirmed what was already known - what wasn't known was who the mother was, but just as much as Ampere didn't actually want to learn it, so Mesec seemed reluctant to tell it. Did he fear her anger, she wondered faintly, unable to think of any other reason he might keep their mother a secret.

Or is she dead? Ampere couldn't help but notice the mare was not here.
Though, these children didn't much seem touched by loss yet. Then again, neither did Iskra, and he had been.

It didn't matter after all, though.
It never had and it certainly didn't now as Ampere began to sink, choking on her grief. Like water it rushed into all parts of her, filling her, weighing her down and pushing out anything and everyone else. She was surrounded by it on all sides, a murkiness that washed across her eyes until the horses around her were but dim shapes, flitting about like fish in a lake; her hair the seaweed dancing in the motion of their fins.

No one could quite seem to understand it either. It's as if they looked at her and wondered she she didn't just swim.
Didn't they know? She had become the water, after all this time.

"H-he," she continued as her lungs rattled some air in, the sensation whooshing past all the water, keeping her alive just enough to suffer longer. "G-g-g" like bile in the back of her throat the word was coming up, but she was trying to keep it down. Gasping, shaking, until finally collapsing with the weight of the name she hadn't spoken for weeks.

"Gaucho."

Her knees leaned her towards the ground as Ampere crashed into a kneel, her head slung carelessly against the terrain with a wide-eyed stare of horror that looked but didn't see. Sweat pooled in the edges of her features, an anxious response to finally letting this small part of him go; his name upon her lips. Mare air seemed to get into her lungs as she pushed that word out, and although she wasn't anywhere near the surface, it was a start.

"Gaucho is dead" she whispered fiercely, the grasses swaying with the force of her breath.

It was real now.
Part of her thought if she just never said it, if she just held onto it long enough inside of her, then maybe something could change. Maybe he'd come back, maybe he'd visit her in some way, maybe he'd be reborn and she could watch him renew. Such thoughts had her wondering about Sohalia's daughter again, the one that said she saw his spirit. Desperately Ampere wanted to hold onto that belief, that Gaucho was still present int he world in some small manner, yet she couldn't help but feeling like he was utterly and completely gone. A cold corpse that burned only one more time as his hide was reduced to ash.

She'd wanted a phoenix, but he'd only ever been a Wildfire after all.