Wheeling Gull Isle have you come here to play jesus

She drew her nose to her chest slowly and choked a sob.  How could she communicate that her children deserved a chance at a normal life — truly normal, without a retard for a mother?  How that although she desperately wanted to secure her children, it was not likely that she would be allowed?

From the beginning.  That's where she would start.  S-starshine want to know, why here?  Why Un-der-see?  The inkdog's compassionate cerulean gaze was ever-soft as she nodded for her black-masked raven to continue.

Her story began before even the Teekon Wilds, with the sting of abandonment from both her mother and her only littermate.  She detailed how her mother did not speak, and did not seem to respond to her children's cries.

Of Xan, and how he lured her to the valley with just an otter.  Of how she had met and loved Moorhen.  How she thought that finally, she had found somewhere she would be accepted for who she was.

And how that all came crashing down so fast — Alexander and Indra tucked away in the woods, how afterwards she claimed him and he snuck away with Laurel anyway.  How both girls seemed to hate that Reigi lived and breathed, and every incident that had carried out.  How she tried to extend an olive branch to those girls more than once and how they kept throwing it in her face.  How Xan punished her for trying -- how he never seemed to care for his wife's plight.

When her stunted words failed her she would gently play out the actions with Coelacanth, using herself as the aggressor and the inkdog as her unwitting victim.  She spoke more words in this single interaction than she ever had in her life, because if anyone were to understand her, it would be the inkstained empath.

She explained why she left, and why she had left her children behind, and when she had finished telling her story, she cried openly.  S-seelie, she gasped, quivering in the sands, Em — em I a retarded?