You're a diamond, dear

Eira... Horror! It was as hot through her as the mid-Scorch sun, and remorse was a venom that poisoned her moral conscience swiftly. “Oh, no, no, no!” …her empathetic mind wept bitterly, all too aware of the grim event unravelled and her accountability in it. The tiny creature - the parent - with its spray of white, soft-looking hair and shining, gaping eyes vanished easily into the busy background of the rainforest, though the worried young horse had already stepped after it; stopping suddenly again, however, as thought of the vulnerable babe snagged still in her mane. There was no escaping the heart wrenching sequence of flashbacks which followed. Even as her tender eyes embraced the weeping Eriucla, there was a sudden vagueness about them, distance, for she was again standing in the swamp which had swallowed her beloved family. The screams echo wildly, the fury, amplified by a savage wind that twirls and twists about the barbaric monster on his battlefield. She can see them - Ma, Pa - and calls desperately, feebly, with a voice choked by fear. Indra is close by, calling out to her “Eira! Eira!” …but the darkness crawls about him hungrily like fingers (as it does her), binding together his wet, silvery legs and dragging him ever nearer to the howling black hole. She falls heavily into the thick, stinking bog and it floods her spluttering nostrils, leaks between the bared clench of her teeth - she feels nauseous, frightened, and she cries out again. Searching with ocean-blue eyes, she discovers the aerial plight of her mother. Wheeling and diving with masterful prowess, the weather-coated mare is simply snuffed from existence. The child is paralysed, confused… and Indra, beside her, is gone. The chilled stroke of the rain worked quickly to dissolve the hot tears as they streamed down the orphan’s thin face, and with clearing eyes, she regarded her puny captive. She knew well the agony accompanying loss and the bitter weight of hopeless despair. Tipping the butchered feathers again above the infant like an umbrella, she sighed (with meticulous care this time), and lowered slowly to the saturated ground. Unsure what to do, for she was barely beyond childhood herself, Eira encouraged the little Eriucla with gentle warm lips, to alight upon her knee. Though shocked and yet to cease weeping, she complied. “Are you a fairy?” the worried filly mused silently, for she was as delicately formed as the pellucid wings of a dragonfly. “I’m so sorry little Fay, please don’t cry. I’m so very sorry…” "I am a book of snow, a spacious hand, an open meadow, a circle that waits, I belong to the earth and its winter."

- Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden