Wheeling Gull Isle four in the morning

To have found him only to lose him again — Coelacanth held onto her composure, but just barely. Had she been human, the delicate bones of her wrists would have jutted alarmingly with the violent wrenching of her helpless hands, fingers white-knuckled, nails cracked and bleeding from scrabbling so fiercely to cling to a precipice she did not own. She went first to her uncle and was swiftly swept up against his lean chest in a warm embrace. “Oh, now,” he chided her gently, knowing all the while he was attempting to make light of a situation that for Seelie was a heavy, funereal abyss, “it’ll be okay, heart’s ease.” She drew no comfort from the words, but schooled her finely drawn features into a reassuring smile and turned to exchange fond farewells with her aunts.

Only half-listening to their reassurances, she forced herself to face the hardest goodbye of all. Though she longed to break down and beg him to stay, the littlest Corten greeted her twin with a gentle, sorrowful smile — and only she knew how much this façade cost her. “I am always with you,” she promised him, nosing at his cheek and pressing her tiny body along the length of his. The sexual dimorphism of their breed dictated a difference in size and a thickening of the long fur of Amoxtli’s ruff, but she fit perfectly beside him as she always had and rubbed her cheek lovingly against his withers, breathing deeply of his scent before drawing away. Prolonging this would make it harder on both of them, and so, despite the guilt she felt at doing so, she kissed her only brother goodbye and gave him a parting gift: a fiery chunk of spectrolite from the labyrinth, polished smooth by the roll of sand and sea. Then she turned and quietly trotted away, an uncharacteristic heaviness in her gait.

Distance would make it impossible for any of the quartet to see her shaking shoulders and pain-tautened mouth — but she would watch them until they disappeared from view. Her chosen vantage point was Skybowl. She clambered up the little caldera’s slope and watched her family go, a miniscule ink drawing of a tuft-eared sheepdog silhouetted against the weeping sky.