Sunspire Mountains she slipped the lock, and changed her dress

esme found she couldn't conjure up a single word during her cum receptacle of a dam's cold-eyed monologue, pluming every feather that her daughter had managed to ruffle with a prim neatness. 

the more she talked, the more esme felt loathing, toward both her mother and herself, ensconce itself in her. her chest heaved, legs atremble with the urge to lunge and dismantle wylla's gorge—anything to choke out the words welling forth, but she lost heart before the violent compulsion could form a full silhouette her mind.  

her lips gathered in an angry crumple; she direly wanted to remonstrate with her mother's fucked up perspective of her experience, but after a fashion her insides were so igneous and thrawn she couldn't breathe straight if she wanted to. it was in some moment between the victim blaming and accusation of abandonment that she remembered who wylla was at her core. the exact reason why tiercel had not returned with her niece to the glade.

nothing esme had to say would make her feel redeemed in her mother's eyes. nothing tiercel said ever could.

she could reanimate the child rotting inside of her and recite her story in all its execrable detail, and it would still never matter. 

esme was the product of violence and violence would always be the sum of her, in posterity and in pith.  

"when you grow the fuck up and take responsibility for your own mistakes, maybe we can talk then,"

and then she turned her back on esme. possessed of the emotional repertoire of a divorce lawyer, her face reflected a blunted affect as she watched her mother begin to depart. "talk? i don't expect we'll be meeting again, much less talking," she remarked as she watched her walk away,

"giving consideration to that, and despite my doubts that you even care to know: your grandchildren are buried beneath the largest dogwood we always passed going to the glade from the coast," she informed her, a doorknob confession, with a strange emptiness describing her voice.

esme too turned to leave in an easterly direction, relaxing the tension she was unaware she'd been clenching in her muscles, impassible, almost as if there wasn't a well-aimed, thrusted dirk for every chamber, atria, and ventricle of her heart.