He had not left the GoldenShade alone since returning to Helovia, and moving into the realm of the Earth.

Even when Ranjiri might have thought herself alone, Dragomir was not far, his thoughts preoccupied with the general worries any father figure went through when birth drew near. That the season was so late only added to his trepidations, the thoughtful, often anxious stallion having been driven to listless pacing, and half-hearted grazing.

The nearer the time drew, the more worried he became, until, when the day at last arrived, and Ranjiri moved off to her foaling clearing, the stallion found he hadn’t the nerve to follow, leaving him fretfully circling about, a very short distance from where his dearest’s first child was coming into the world. Having dug a muddy, circular rut in the earth with his aimlessness, the stallion occasionally could be heard muttering, his thoughts too pervasive to remain entirely internalized.

"Get yourself together," is the last of these muted, garbled statements heard from under his breath, the worn, snow circle suddenly broken, as he redirects himself towards the clearing in which Ranjiri waited, goading himself along with mental jabs about how she might need his help.

He finds himself rather unprepared for the sight which greets him.

“Letha,” his darling tells a sticky bundle of legs and pelt, and Dragomir directs his attention to it after ensuring that Ranjiri is well, albeit weary. Laying in a pool of fluids and goo, the girl child is almost entirely black, but for the faint marks of gold which glitter along her body. Approaching slowly, nostrils wide and flickering with anxious breath, the stallion finds his heart feeling with equal parts delightful wonder, and disgust. The girl at Ranjiri’s hooves is pretty and precious in all the ways the fluids on her smell foul to Dragomir’s tender nose, and without the surge of fatherly instinct to carry him onward through this as would be natural, the crafter is left with only his own will power. Still, he does manage to fight the sudden swimming in his brain to approach the two, as cautiously as such a colossal creature might, eager to meet Ranjiri’s daughter.

"How dainty, little Letha," he muses, having never seen a newborn so close, her tender skin still wrinkled from the damp, warm den from which she’d just fallen. Gently touching Ranjiri’s cheek with his lips as he looks away from the babe, he tastes the salt of her sweat.

"Are you well?" he questions, almost fretfully, not knowing the slightest about how to tell whether a birth had been dangerous or not, and even more worried by the lateness of the season. That it was also Ranjiri’s first child made his heart palpitate, the reality that first children can often be the last one of the few he really knows about childbirth. While he was willing to help Ranjiri with Letha, he certainly did not care for taking care of her alone, for more reasons than one. "Should I go get someone?"