he had found her scent farther across the borders; he had followed it several times, only to halt himself and turn back to his endless patrol of their high-flung territory. with all that had gone on, mahler kept himself to a strict routine, one that brought him to phaedra as often as he might, and the other division given to his growing younger daughters.
but he had grown distant, embattled by the coldness within him and the miasma of guilt he dragged behind himself as if it were a ragged cloak, moth-eaten and pathetic. 
he visited star upon his rounds as doktor, and as father, mahler descended to the jagged rocks that wylla had once believed might take one of their brood.
and he stared at the toothed stones, and knew in his heavied spirit the torment of never understanding what had befallen the boy.
upward he trudged, until despite his shackles of exhaustion and horror and the deep ache of festering anger, mahler began to run, along some narrow stone spine that sent the gargoyle's pelt flaring with harsh currents of air. and then all at once he was climbing, feeling the air began to thin and frost; it caught in his throat, swelled his lungs, and as the earth turned to hard-packed snow, he heard her.
voice, shot through with tension, frayed; it tore at mahler. thade, his name thrust into the moan of the wind by his suffering mother. helplessly, he followed, suddenly, eyes half-shut against the rake of the air and fixed upon wylla. he would lose her, had lost her; she would fall here; she would give way; she would give up.
he could not bear the thought of losing the woman that his failed love had hardened; mahler trudged through the snow until he had overtaken her small build, seeking to shield her from the worst of the elements as thade's name echoed from his own throat into the void of sagtannet's unhearing heights.