guilt over the rebellion in phaedra quelled by yours truly haunted mahler, and in the days that followed, he was saddled with the detrimental conception that he had somehow ruined his little daughter. such thoughts filled the gargoyle with a marrow-felt disheartening, and he proceeded to embark upon a detailed tour of his greatest failures in the interim between the clash of teeth and rediscovering his zuckermaus.
and always, always did the coursing of his innermost perusal lead him back to marigold. how would she feel to see him now, without a wife but father to a pair of whelps all the same, with more soon to unfurl with first breath? his life now was not what mahler had expected it to be, but there was no regret in him when it came to thoughts of the chosen path.
a shuddering breath. he did not speak of marigold with wylla, nor with nyx. the gold of her memories was locked back in the depths of his throat, surfacing only in the splintered wood of his voice when he simply must mention her. but now the musiker was alone, seeking through some streambed for watersmoothed pebbles he might bring back to thade, and here a stick of apple blossoms, broken carefully from their bobbing branch with a deft nip of teeth upheld as mahler balanced heavily, foolishly, upon hinds in the sprawl of forest that climbed the rocky shelves of sagtannet.
little phaedra. mahler followed the lap of the waters along its trail, pausing from time to time and supping of its surface during a pause. his mind, freed to wander where it might along the long dust-flecked halls of memory, took a circuitous route back to marigold, but this time what he recalled of her face was now blurred 'round with a detailing that had come dove-grey in nature, silvered, yellow-eyed.
a chirping somewhere in the distance, the nearby chirrup of birds sleepily cooing to one another the nature of the predator beneath their darkened branches. his family lay abed and mahler had the greenveldt staircases of his land to wander. he had not dipped below the foothills hardly once since diaspora and courtfall had settled together; the exhausted nights wrought in parents by the early days and months had given way to a sort of grudging insomnia.
it was cloaked in this half-awareness that mahler trudged through the wild country that he and wylla and wintersbane had chosen and held these past months. not even a year, nor six passings of the moon — but it certainly seemed quite longer with how closely they had collected their packlands into one.
pacing alongside the waterway, mahler took himself back in the direction of the quiet den, and would have stepped out into the clearer places to seek a lie-down spot, had not the tendril of phaedra's live pathmarks come to him. tail lashed at his hocks, and with a low sigh, mahler chuckled to himself and wheeled about to seek after his recalcitrant spawn.
whatever amusement mahler may have held for the moment swiftly fled as the stream roughened into choppier harshness. it was with fair ease that mahler traversed, but he was grimly aware that such a deluge would be as windholme for the child. a cough beneath his breath as heavy legs churned onward, and onward.
phaedra.
the man's air caught in his throat. he refused to succumb to panic, but as the waters widened and yawned into deeper pools, mahler's gaze grew hard with dread, a purple hue to the fatherly grief that he anticipated, and horror tightened his throat. he splashed alongside the thickening ribbon of rushing currents, leapt in a bound a thinner place, and 
phaedra.
limbs grew loose with relief, and the beginnings of terror smarted into tears behind the gargoyle's eyelids. pale child lying amid the waters, dampened; mahler read the message of what had happened and waded into the stream. far too deep for her. far too dangerous — he cursed himself and leant dripping over the paperdraped figure of his tiny child as he sought her breath and murmured her name.