Sunspire Mountains she slipped the lock, and changed her dress

the horizon spilled onto trees where amber turned to periwinkle, promising another rainless, midsummer night. the rufescent wolf crested the scarped bluff and took stock of the wilderness she would journey over in the coming days, regarding the alpenglow of the spire. esmé hedged a sigh into the evening air. hundreds of miles behind her, hundreds of miles vanward, hundreds stood astride her. 

she traveled by nightfall and cleaved to shadow or covert by the daylight hour, but for the time being departed early in the evening to navigate by the direction of the sunset. 

presently, she sought a tributary from which she could quench her thirst, then follow downstream until its towpath led to thicker trees. rivers were the roads of the forest, this she knew and held fast to. shaking out her ruff, esmé carried on her way in a gamely trot, meandering to lower elevations until her effort was rewarded when a jewel-blue stream carved out of her path.

eagerly she drank, with a stature like a falcate—springtrap and self-possessive. the surplus of water was laden on her stomach, but her focus was keen on her surroundings lest the cruor of her body attract unwanted visitors.

Wylla drifted ghost-like from Sagtannet's borders as the afternoon grew late, scarcely noticing that she was leaving at all. By now, she was certain her son was dead. There was no body to bury, but it'd been over a month since any trace of him had been found in spite of multiple wolves looking. Mahler had sent one of their newer wolves out to search the world beyond. They searched the territory daily. Wylla searched beyond the borders almost as frequently, but never going far. Phaedra needed her close.

Phaedra needed her, but her legs kept moving, reaching unbeknownst for the distant sea, that she might disappear into it and never emerge again. If she kept going in this direction, she would reach the shore, and maybe find comfort in the endless fathoms. There she might die with a smile on her lips, bitter as it might be.

That was the song of her subconscious. Wylla remained unconscious to the depths of her despondency even as she descended one rise and ascended another, walking well into the evening with no destination in mind. She should return, but turning back felt impossible. For Phaedra, her mind pleaded, but another voice was quick to say, Phaedra hates you, too. It wasn't true, but something had changed recently that made her feel that way. Her daughter avoided her—it was the last blow her heart could take, and so she wandered, lost.

Unlike the slight wolf bent over the stream, Wylla was completely unaware of her surroundings, a new development for such a typically paranoid creature. She padded through the trees with a vacant stare, drawn to the sound of water only for its familiarity, and at first she didn't even notice the ghost of her past standing there when she bent to lap at the water. When she lifted her snout again and marked the dark wolf across the way, Wylla blinked slowly, eyes wandering over a terribly familiar white blotch on her chest, and spoke not with the disbelief that was appropriate to this situation, but with a deadpan lack of emotion: Tiercel?

Because her first-born daughter was long gone. This was merely a hallucination, born of a hope she no longer deserved to hold.

after some time by the stream, she'd allowed herself to work loose some of the tension her body contained to gaze absently at the water. 

it was no more than a moment. she could have laid her hand on a bible and sworn an oath that the universe saw fit to reunite opposing forces in that infinitesimal aperture of time, passing along no rumor regarding the fossilized spall of her history about to enter swiftly into her orbit.

the phlegmatic beckon harbored nary a breath of warmth. tiercel— no, esmé, sat herself upright, making no move to embrace the giver of her profaned life, and was outerly inscrutable despite the seasickness in her head. she deftly hid the soft pink of her abdomen with a hairpin bend of her forelegs, though her vermilion vesture was worn without compunction.

"i have to admit, i am disappointed with my reception," she said, feigning woundedness, before meeting wylla's dulled gaze with a sterile, withering stare.

Wylla's flat eyes held the simmering magma of Tiercel's for a long moment. Her first-born's words made her flinch a little, and the only reason her daughter's cool greeting didn't cleave her heart in two was that there was nothing left to harm. It was already in tatters.

She tried to recall the last time she'd seen Tiercel. She thought it was Keokuk Glade, when her daughter set out with her cousin to explore the world or whatever it was they'd done. When Singra returned without her, Wylla herself had left, only to find her way back to this wilderness, where she'd settled down and forgotten. No—never forgotten. Other matters had simply needed her attention more, and finding Tiercel had been placed on the back burner. It wasn't like she could canvas the whole entire world for her wayward child.

She could recall nothing deserving of the contemptuous spark of Tiercel's eyes, and that was how she knew. This was only in her mind. You're not real, she said sadly, hoping to dispel the illusion of her lost daughter with that declaration, much as the reminder of another loss in her life stung her.

a sadness that limned her tongue listlessly proclaimed the quietus of her eldest's existence. it all but nearly ripped tiercel from her grave-clothes, a mnemonic resurrection that made esmé tremble with indignation.  

how much had this mental gangrene consumed her mother's mind that her own child was naught but a myth, even standing before her? 

"i sincerely believe you wish that were true," she said, lids cresecenting impassibly as she gazed towards the melancholic woman she scarcely recognized were it not for her scent. esmé lurched to her feet and stepped partway towards her ...

and with her paw abruptly baled out a cold splash of water from the stream, aimed at wylla's face.

it was not a playful gesture, rather one intended to shock her. "real enough for you yet? what business do you have following me?" 

Wylla scarcely heard Tiercel's rejoinder, so lost within her own melancholy was she. She might not have heard another word Tiercel said, period, if it wasn't for the abrupt shock of cold water hitting her in the face. With a splutter, the Eisen stepped back. For just a moment, the fire that usually burned hot in her soul flared and her face contorted into a snarl.

But then she was faced with the uncomfortable knowledge that her daughter was really, truly in front of her, and barbing her with a scathing look that she might recognize if she ever observed her own reflection. Stunned into silence, Wylla could only stare with hurt leaching slowly into her eyes. Tiercel left her. Tiercel left her and was standing here now, staring at her with something Wylla could only identify as hatred.

Tiercel, she breathed, taking a tenuous step toward her grown first-born, only to hesitate. You never came home. Singra came back but you never did, I... got worried. That wasn't much of an explanation, but it was the best she could manage through the gloomy miasma that had claimed all her verve and vigour. I was afraid, I... but you're alive. Thank god. Whatever Tiercel might believe, in spite of all their fighting, Wylla's daughter was the best thing that ever happened to her—including the birth of her most recent cubs, which had only brought her immense pain so far. Unfair as it was to Phaedra and the missing-probably-dead Thade, neither of them could really hold a candle to Tiercel. Wylla had her on a pedestal. A frustrated one, but a pedestal nevertheless.

her mother arrived to her senses, quelling her daughter's agitation. the eisen's brief snarl was met with a bland countenance, until she breathed out the name of the defiled

tiercel

she flexed her claws in the soft alluvium underfoot, gooseflesh rippling across her hackles as the name she'd sloughed off with her unpetaled innocence was once again disinterred from its unmarked tumulus. the phantom charnel stench made a muscle in her jaw convulse. she pinched her eyes shut and bruxed her teeth in a self-controlled clench.

once her mother unsurely hesitated a step towards her, tier— no! no. esmé snapped her head up and drew back like a tide retreating minutes before the tsunami hit. but no tears were shed, not on her behalf. she had supped on enough tears. she'd long felt charred black from the inside-out, and any saltglim that wept from her eye would be kissed by steam on the scalding mantel of her cheek.

she was not so careless in her movements as to inform her mother of her embonpoint, aching and burning from not having ever expressed her milk. the sly uptuck of her stomach tensed and churned sourly, but with it came peace of mind upon tell of singra's safe return to her eldermother's vale. over the purl of the stream, wylla continued her tentative narrative. 

esmé huffed a laugh mid-explanation, "worried! wasted," and canted her head to stare at the minnows in the stream.

but her mother went on, and the blood-imbrued woman let her, but her expression remained an effigy of indifference. whatever tiercel had been to wylla, golden child or chopping block, that was not esmé, and could never be. the sorrow and emotional potsherd her truth might entail was a thing she could not persuade from her mother's heart, but she must know for esmé's closure on the little girl decomposing within her.

tiercel.

she couldn't bear to hear the name again. 

after some silence, she lowly said, "you're wrong," her eyes hunting up the havoc-wrought state of this ... this ... woman, who'd been her giver of life. she couldn't recall their last interaction before she and singra had gigglingly set out for what they deemed an adventure, but she was sure the wolf that stood before her was not the one she'd left behind. esmé could sit all day flicking matches at this one and she wouldn't take fire; no, something'd smothered her and left the smoking remnants of ash and black coal where embers once glowed. 

unfortunate thing. she couldn't be sure if the loss of her first child did it, or some other thing. the erosion of her conscience failed to convince her that she cared enough to question it.

"tiercel is dead." she remarked. slimline little body, crying and pleading ("mother!"), but a forcible sup of passion flower and bitter poppy sirup down her throat stole her voice and stole her choice. she could almost remember the amaroidal bite of it on her tongue now, flowing in her gizzard; so many times she'd drained it just to numb the trespasses of her body.

eventually, she welcomed it with an appetite for the darkness it gifted and the amnesia that followed. but she always knew what happened in the light, in the night, at his behest; felt where it ached, like she'd been torn in half, every-time.

she surfaced from her memories with a head reeling gasp of anger. "she's dead, do you hear me? she's dead and she's never coming back. you can't bring her home." her voice shook with hatred. not for her mother, but for tiercel and her stupidity.

she couldn't puzzle out what had chanced their convergence here, in this strange region to which esmé felt no connection. her memory of being in the mountains with singra were muzzy in her head, and for all she knew they had only wandered so far as the mountains of keokuk ... she could much less presume that a small portion of her childhood belonged to this wilderness. 

abruptly, as if they hadn't been discussing the ruination of the daughter, a heavy breath flapped from esme's lips as if stricken with boredom. the red dahlia traced her gaze up the mountain and it's rapier-tipped zeniths.

"good place to impale a man," she murmured with a thoughtful pucker of her gums. "mmm," opportunity lost,

what a fucking shame.

Tiercel did her best to hide everything, but Wylla wasn't stupid. She didn't know the nature of the change—the truth would've turned her stomach inside out—but she could smell it. Something was significantly different about Tiercel. She entertained the delusional notion of drawing her eldest daughter into an embrace, to ask what was wrong, but that was shattered by the way Tiercel shied away from her and unleashed her vitriol.

Once upon a time, Wylla would've snapped at Tiercel for being impertinent. Their relationship had never been particularly healthy. Now, she didn't have the strength to feel anything but the cold wash of hurt at being rejected. She misunderstood the hatred in her daughter's voice as being levelled at her. Hadn't Tiercel left her?

You don't get to be dead, she said flatly, eyes narrowed with the hurt of her daughter's words. She couldn't stoke even a single ember to mock Tiercel for the ridiculousness of her statements. Did she think by shedding her name, she shed who she was? That wasn't how life worked. If it was, Wylla would've changed hers long ago, but changing her name wouldn't erase what came before. That was true for Tiercel as well, and if she had any of her usual energy, she would've been offended that the name she'd christened her accidental first child with was thrown aside. But her energy was spent. She was a husk without an argument to offer.

Tiercel remarked on the mountains. Wylla agreed, but didn't know how to forge a connection that way. Instead, she fumbled with her tongue a moment before quietly asked, where did you go? If Tiercel thought her worry was a waste, then she wouldn't reiterate it, but it was still there, layered between hurt and relief and confusion and the cracked, smouldering ruin of the anger that had always ruled her before.

"then i have just the best news: i'm not dead," esmé said just as flatly, with a jouking lurch of her sharp-set shoulders when her mother narrowed her eyes at her—"but tiercel, your child? that stupid little girl who would run into the arms of a man just to get a taste of what having a father was like?" she dwelt calmly, crossing the stream to pace in an restless circle before fixing the woman icily in her sights, "she got a taste alright," esmé laughed mirthlessly at her own unsavory wordplay. it would be hard to tell if she was sincere or just trying to work her mother up into a pother, something she'd doubtless perfected in the womb. "she is. i buried her, me, esmé"

she stopped pacing and a sad, vacant expression streaked the midnight welkin of her face like a shooting star, too fast to catch unless you were looking for it. frowning, she snapped her gaze up and looked upon her mother with more detail than in the moments before. she noticed how her color had washed somewhat lighter since they'd last seen eachother. she appeared well-nourished, thriving even ... moreso than the wastrel she called a daughter.

wylla also struck esmé as being very much troubled, and long before she'd arrived. it showed in the features of her mien like displaced faultlines deep in the earth.

and, just as wylla had the intuition that there was something different about "tiercel", esmé intuited the same about the woman standing before her, asking questions she didn't want the answers to. "give me even one good fucking reason i owe you my life story!" she demanded, and then openly mulled over her mother's figure, "you look well fed. strong. been whoring yourself out for leftovers?" she remarked with voice like silk clenched between her teeth. fight with me, do it!

her mailed fist self-control was slipping. esmé snorted with a flare of her nostrils, pinning her ears and gritting her teeth. "tell me what you're doing here or i'm leaving."

Tiercel talked and talked, delivering sharp jabs in the form of antagonizing and heated words. Wylla felt each punch in her soul, but at first none of them beat as heavily as the realization of just what had happened to her firstborn in her absence. It didn't take much reading between the lines to decipher. Horror wrapped its talons around her midriff and slid backward, pulling Wylla's stomach to the floor with it and churning nausea and denial in its place.

Tiercel's new name barely registered. Maybe it was because Wylla just didn't want to hear it. Whatever Tiercel called herself these days, it couldn't erase the stain. The hurt. There was a moment where Wylla teetered on her paws, seconds away from closing the distance and drawing her daughter into an embrace, whether or not Tiercel harmed her for it, but the expletives, the accusation in those acrid golden eyes, the hissing assessment of her figure—

The flame that had gone out roared indignantly to life and Wylla flared along with it, hackles on end as she stood at her tallest (still diminutive, RIP). You DO NOT speak to me like that! she snapped, every word wreathed with more rage than she'd commanded in a long time. Even the blades she'd pierced Mahler with paled in comparison. Tiercel might've hit a little close to home—after all, her litters were sired by two different men and still she claimed no mate. The first was a no good scoundrel. The second was busy doting on another bitch and her whelps, and she continued thinking that maybe one day, she would be good enough for him to choose her, only her, not because of their kids or any other reason. Did that make Wylla a whore?

Probably, in some fashion.

I AM YOUR MOTHER! she bellowed, jaws agape and fangs wicked in the low light, YOU WILL NOT COME NEAR MY HOME AND DISRESPECT ME, YOU LITTLE CUNT!

all it took was one disparaging remark and wylla's pyre roared with fire anew, each word licked with flame. esme gazed glacially at her mother, taking the blows with the mailed gauntlet of indifference. "seems to me like i already have?" she lipped back, peeling her gums back over her teeth in a snarl.

she did not yell back, as she would have as a child. instead, she remained self-controlled, breathing huffs from her nostrils as the woman who called herself her mother shrieked with all the strength of her lungs. 

secretly, each word was a scythe swipe that opened a fresh wound in her chest. a muscle in esme's cheek jumped, but she did not speak a word until wylla roared that she was her mother and esme could not hold back a peal of laughter.

she walked in a tight circle, chuckling with disbelief, as her mother clinched her tirade with a viperous punctuation. an attempt slated to hurt her daughter, what she was best at. "oh, i lack the depth and warmth to be a cunt, unfortunately," she aired snidely, gouging marks in the soil with her flexing claws. 

her eyes implored wylla's focus for what she spoke next, squinting gaze. "i cried for my mother, every single time. i endured it all with the faith that she would someday rescue me, long after i should have lost hope," she spoke lowly, lashing her tail against her flanks. "but that wasn't you, because here you are, calling this place your home. but i suppose when you lose a child, well, there's always next year, right?" unaware of just how sharply her tongue might have whetted its blade, she paced testily back and forth, back and forth—

"do it again. call yourself a mother."

Wylla's fuse, which once burned hot long after the source of her anger was gone, was woefully short this time. Almost as soon as her rage exploded out of her, it fizzled and she was left at a seething simmer. Numbness spread through her body, dousing the flames, returning her to her despondence. Tiercel might recognize the signs of disconnect entering her dam's flat gaze again, and while she did listen, her daughter's scathing accusations couldn't rouse her anger again.

You left me, Wylla said in a voice slung low and cold. I searched for you. For months. But you said it yourself. You're a stupid child who ran into the arms of a man. Your choices have consequences and you don't get to blame me for that. Tiercel knew of the occurrence between herself and Raptor, or at least, she knew Wylla's account of it. If she'd been enough of an idiot to seek strange men anyway, well, that was her problem. Wylla was great at blaming others for her mistakes and issues, which Tiercel clearly inherited, but where she was oblivious to the wrongness of herself doing it, she scoffed at Tiercel trying to pull that card on her.

You forfeited my protection and my ability to save you when you abandoned me. How Tiercel could possibly imagine that Wylla would find her, when she'd indubitably made every effort to not be found, Wylla would never know. Tiercel was a lot like her when she was that young—she would've expected the same thing of Lusca, and it truly did tear her heart apart that her daughter had to endure that alone—but she was old enough now that she wouldn't take the blame for her kid's decisions.

I never lost you, Tiercel. You left of your own accord. I tried my best to find you, but I'm not a fucking psychic, and my life doesn't end because you chose to leave it. I had to assume you were okay and move on eventually. Her lips twisted, not quite a sneer, not quite a grimace—locked somewhere between deepest disappointment and savage hurt for all that had befallen her child. The child once smitten with purple flowers. The little duckling. I am your mother, whether you like it or not, but I don't have to be your mom. It seared her heart and her soul alike to say that, set her eyes alight with unshed tears, but hadn't Tiercel said that in as many words? Obviously, Wylla was a failure in her eyes for being unable to find her and save her, and the Eisen lacked the fortitude—or the care—to grovel at her firstborn's feet to try to right that wrong. She was too busy searching for Thade, trying to make sure Phaedra didn't end up like her older sister. She didn't have time to coddle Tiercel, too.

When you grow the fuck up and take responsibility for your own mistakes, maybe we can talk then. And she turned away, on high alert for any indication that Tiercel would attack, but otherwise dismissive of her accusatory daughter. She couldn't stay in Tiercel's presence one second more. Her heart was broken enough.

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.

Tiercel had always had one last poisoned knife in her arsenal, no matter the situation. This, she thrust directly into her mother's heart, revealing that not only had her assault saddled her with children, but they were all dead now.

They would've been Wylla's grandchildren, but even if they weren't dead, she never would've met them. Tiercel would never have come back. This was the same mind game she had always played, but more sinister now, more spiteful. Wylla tried her best to construct a cold wall from that logic against this final bullet, but she just couldn't. It pierced into the heart of her and spilled out all her failings as a mother, blackening every organ with clenching sorrow. She knew better than to blame Tiercel, and yet... and yet, here they were.

She maintained a stiff back and neck as she left, forcing herself to not look back, forcing that cold-hearted aspect Tiercel believed of her, but when she passed Sagtannet's borders again she came undone and slunk silently to the nearest secluded hole in the ground to cry her heart out. That was all she seemed to do these days.