"Mom?" The word rang hollow, eaten up by the clutter of dense brush that the foal lay under, his lanky legs tangled within each other. He shut his immature eyes and pushed back his thoughts, pricking his ears to try and listen past the rustle and the quiet and the wind and the heartbeat.

Where was she?

He tried to conjure up her likeness in the blackness of his eyelids. She was white... or was she yellow? Some light color. He remembered blinking into a face of light, her nuzzle close to his as she breathed in his scent and he drank in her appearance. Her mane was long, tassels of it dripping down to her nose, which she'd pushed into his face with a playful snort. But, perhaps most vividly, he remembered her eyes. They were green, as bright as the light that was shining around her, and they sparkled at him. He remembered smiling back, blinking at her and nickering at her and feeling... oh so many things.

But that was it. Try as he might, he could not conjure up anything else about his mother. Unwittingly, a whine pushed its way past his lips, the thin sound agonizing in the lush ambiance he was seated in. He opened his eyes, struggling to adjust to the rash amounts of colors that threatened to overwhelm him. His head dropped into the dirt, where he squeezed his eyes shut and flattened his ears. Where was his mom? Where was he? And why weren't they together?

A sudden rustling from somewhere behind him made the little boy startle. Suddenly, his eyes were open, his ear erects as he attempted to lift himself as high as he dare to get a better vantage on what could be approaching. Mom? It had to be.

"Oh? What's this?" Lyrics of a decidedly not female tone greeted his ears. The boy stared.

"Who?"

This thing was anything but light. Not his mom. He was brown, shaggy brown black, brown with stripes of a tan, like unhealed burns, latticed across his body. Antlers graced his head, just below his ears, and a great curved spike grew from his shoulder blades, stretching over his back like some massive claw. He was a horse though, clearly, by both his scent and his language. His eyes turned and met the boys, and a look shot through the two of them, the look of a kind stranger and a helpless child.

"Calm, child. My name is Cletus. Please, there is no reason to fear me."