mahler, having not known the true nature of wylla's previous relationship with nyx, seized upon it with a fierce surge of annoyance. while he believed that the little wolfess had been threatened by his previous agreement, was it not she who had become eisen with he and wintersbane? what did nyx have? nothing, nothing beyond the spare reach of his affection and the daughters he had sired.
in mahler's mind, wylla had never intended to forgive the golden woman, inasmuch as she would forever hold his mistakes above his world-weary head. that enough rankled him, but moreover, it was her belief that exclusion was not harmful. inward furnace swelling, lips thinning further as wylla flung her words toward him.
snippets of ice, of her own barely veiled anguish, and the overwhelming sense of fury that clung limpet-like to every castigation. she was ruler here and nyx was gone, returned with elke and ciri to a true experience of familial love he had never been able to deliver to her heart even despite all his wishes.
"you do not think their leader refusing to recognize their existence was a burden, in some vay? you do not think that they vere old enough to know how much you vent beyond yourself to ignore them, vylla? that they knew so clearly their place here, and that it vas low?" eyes narrowing. "your contention vith nyx in the past does not matter here. this is vhy i did not vant to hear your endless grievances! they never stop. they never cease." 
for that, after all of it — this was the sum of mahler: dust. 
when she had finished, and he heard the breath come again, sweeping into her throat, the gargyole found he had nothing to say.
"i asked you to be my vife, vylla. and you said no," he discovered all the same, a thrumming pinprick of memory cutting from behind his ear. "i offered you the legitimacy i offered no vone else, and you turned it aside." he turned now his lilac stare to the cold climbing forests of the peak. "it seems, vylla, that you vill not believe a vord i say unless i discard everyvone else for you."
the twist of her blade, that he should stay in moonspear. "she does not vant me either," came the respondent edge of chillweather warning. "believe me or do not, but it is the truth. there is not some ... grand conspiracy against you. only a woman who feared you in every way and my own failings, for vich i have paid dearly. i am happy to pay for my sins, desperate to atone however i might, but i have never lied to you, vylla. not vonce. you knew vhat it vas from the beginning, and yet you still chose me."
his gaze turned back to her own by now. "sagtannet is vhere phaedra and thade were born, and it is vhere i vant to be! not there." mahler no more desired to be one of hydra's subjects than he wished to be here upon this cold ground clashing with his co-leader once more. his arrangement with nyx had been before before before; before she had ever come back, and for the first time he felt regret rise to choke him.
"you insult me at every turn, vylla; as a father. as a man." a swallow, a light, wormwood chuckle, a blink that angrily sought to burn away the gathering saltwater in his eyesight.
"the irony is that you are right to do so. i deserve this. all of your slights, and your anger. they are mine to carry." accent thickening as if that were somehow possible beyond the already muddled baritone. "and i admit this, freely. alvays, vylla. and to her, as vell. both failed by my selfishness, and our children most of all." a breath. "but they are all mein kinder. i love them more than i love you."
"so vhen i make my decisions, they are vith them in mind. not you. not nyx. them. my decision is to stay in sagtannet because i believe it is best for our children, and my decision is to remain as much in the lives of elke and ciri as i am able." a steadying inhale of cold air. "but i do not ... i do not need to stay here as your fellow leader." 
a twitch of his lips; he pulled his gaze from her own to earth. "it is clear ... it is clear you have no respect for me because i have given you no reason to respect me. you think i am an idiot, at least." searching down, drowning in the hardbit canary depths of her single beautiful eye; oh, she was so deeply, hatefully, bitterly beautiful to mahler, always, a star burning superior in the cold expanse of the darkened skies beyond where he was able to reach. too good. too —
"and it seems ..." had he ever struggled so before, blindsided by his own grasping for composure. "that ve, you and i, have the ability to create vonderful children, but nothing else." not a home. not a partnership. something like love too bordered by thornways, something that attempted so feverishly to be what it could not.

when your children grow up
astarte. brumous. saint. 
they had not grown up, had they? mahler watched as if through a vintage-wrought lookinglass, old warping over memories dredged up by her words.
two sons, a daughter. one son, still. one son, gasping his last; marigold reaching for him, reaching —
her lips forming his name.
and how he had clenched with pain and with terror of the fever, of the black liquid that had risen like silt inside her lungs and poured into her mouth —
and he had run away.
and they don't think about you anymore
but phaedra did not think of him now, did she? even as wylla railed at him, and he listened, chained to this earth and this moment, mahler knew he was completely unaware of where their daughter tread. and astraeus — and 
i would be the one still there, standing beside you. always.
mahler could not conceive of loving anything more than the first breath of a child belonging to him. he had sought midwifery for this simple fact alone: that it was an act of god and the most reverent experience a man could ever share. and he! blessed three times with it, with three children and two, and two — he loved them more because he had not failed at loving his offspring, only their mothers. 
he saw now the rotted core of himself, chewed wood falling away as he grew starveling beneath her tears. again. her tears, which he had caused — again. helpless with the inward masculine instinct to sweep her close, stilled by the sheer hateful act that would be, to pierce her heart and then make some grandiose show,
over and over and over again.
"a mistake?" and his voice cracked, for "loving you vas never a mistake for me, vylla." a mistake? were their children the same? did she in this second feel the deathknell of regret? "not a mistake. but it clearly vas something i should have kept to myself." 
he had wanted to tell her in the snap of her teeth to find another wolf, one who would be the things to her he could not; offering a moth-eaten pauper's strand of threadbare love, and he agreed! at once, in the same fractured tone, "yes." she would have been insulted had he suggested it, but here now, the word deserve and his own name scratched out.
"yes," he said again, and slowly. a wind, climbing the spine of the mountain, pressing suddenly, harshly down upon the individuals therein who stood in another long and pregnant silence.
how long had the first lasted, wylla staring at him, one stricken eye and the other sacrificed in service to this fucking unendingly cold place. to him. the emblem of her love, ripped from her head. and he, offering nothing in return for that.
"you do." again his lips felt molasses, but he experienced the trembling begin in his gut, dread and torment clustering together like pine sap in the low reach of his throat.
had nyx left because he did not love her? mahler had not allowed himself to think that. but he had not loved takiyok either, had felt some great sensation beneath his breastbone for her but believed it to be inferior to the same for wylla. she who had defined the word. and in loyalty to that, he had relinquished all else — even his daughters.
if nyx had left upon her own word and this unspoken want, then full circle it had come. mahler proving his allegiance to this woman over and again with gestures and deeds and decisions that left him raw, but did nothing for her own spirit. he did not think he could ever speak in the language wylla desired, for in his mind he had worked himself to the rawboned scars for her. built walls between any other and his own heart, cut them off, sent them away. set her apart and aside and greater than all else. for that she was, even as she stood tiny and harrowed and infuriated. 
taken his daughters to moonspear voluntarily.
their names beat upon the plantwood core of his heart.
her own hovered upon his mouth.

about his contract, about the existence of his love; secreted nyx somewhere off before their daughters were born, covered her as if the trio of them were a secret. he had not wished to do that; he had reared elke and ciri first upon sawtooth, then here. they knew him as papa, dad — he had given them the gift of his words, and in that task, had alienated wylla and phaedra from his very self.
the incompatibility that was so riftlike between he and her was not surprising. it was the chipped, harsh edges of it, as if they had both woken to their resentments of one another. wylla, her love unrequited. mahler, his own unremarked. both searching for validation in one another while the ways of their affections varied so greatly.
by this time and this year, mahler remember little of his own father. it was only marigold for whom he delved so stridently for, limping back to that particular hallway of dusted memories. but what did remain, the musiker knew to be faded remnants of a bygone day: you must always tell her the truth.
but what had truth ever done for him? and where had truth ever taken him? down a thousand bitter paths. away from marigold. he knew every name of those he had wanted to love and did not; he knew but one name that had inspired him finally to open again, and it was her own. 
mahler, having watched the solemn ocean gather between them these past long months, now waded to the far proverbial shore and watched the waves flock over the remaining bridgework. he would not love her beyond his heart for his children. she would not accept that for what it was. 
it would be settling, then, for wylla, and his soul ached with the longing to kiss her. inexplicably; to dash the tears from her fineboned face and take her into the age-old way of things, the matching of body to spirit.

the last, to clean her wounds, and before, her devotion to his own.
but beyond — repelled by her hurting shield, not comprehending her sudden lashes, or attempting to know them, he had not tried to love her. not in that way. she did not wish even his kiss. and so he had held back from her. put aside the base desire and striven to become more for wylla. yet he had only lost himself in the doing of it. 
another hurt then, that he had applied himself wtih diligence to the daily life of the pack and forgone all others, though she had rejected his first offer. spurned by it, she had said. and that mahler did not understand, and had grown too numb to consider exploring it.
for what he now contemplated was the darkest image of another man,
a better man,
embracing wylla, calling with her into this air and among the tall forests of this place. driving any memory of the gargyole away and —
mahler wanted to gasp, for he could not abdicate the thought, and fixed in his mind the nature of the very loam, the pebble pressed into the sole of his right paw, the cold clawing at his flanks; gorge rising, head swimming,
i deserve better
mein gott mann, du wirst sie jetzt wirklich verlieren.
wylla and the soft voice in the back of her throat for another; wylla and the gilded vein of loyalty in her for another;
if he scarce moved it would decide what he did not. a breath as the shattered vase of her voice dripped into the fragmenting pieces of him. 
"i vant," husky and barely audible above the now-keening wind scudding its claws along the ice toward the peaktop
you, he had said before. he had said it had said it, and had not kept it. even if the desire existed within him, he knew he could not repeat it a second time for already it would be a doomed sentiment.
"i vill," and voice broke again, lip twitching upward in disgust with himself as he rolled his heavy muzzle away from her chastised, chastising expression and into the teeth of the coming storm itself.

ah, but she deserved someone who did not grovel, who did not grind himself so far into the dirt that he must wallow in it as if he were mad. mahler set his jaw, blinked at the bitter salt that had not departed but would not fall. 
"i vill stay until you choose another."
lungs nearsplit with the effort of reining back his own sobs; but this time he would not be the one to turn the line of his back to her; another contract, the only damnable thing mahler could ever feasibly write, and wylla's departure ink on the waiting line. unfair of him, so it was, to force her the rest of the way; he knew he knew he knew, but the sick lurch of the sneering image in his mind kept him moored, that fantastical, horrible dart of lightning down the center of his mind that had hurt him with its lurid nature.

spurned again, mahler was unsure of how much venom from wylla he could bear any longer. but thus he did, molars grinding in the pocket of his jaw as she laid bare all his shortcomings once more. he had meant to impress upon her the nature of his devotion, but it had been another mistake; fodder for her ire to catch and consume.
all her grievances poured betwixt them like poisoning oil, and mahler caught his breath between the fire of wylla's sentences. so belatedly he saw now the way in which she had so needed him to love her, and the way he had chosen to show it instead. even their brief intermission in tense words after he had returned from the cliffside, and she had come back again in her own way. mahler had not trusted it, had expected the lurking miasma of her own misery with him to eke out again.
and as he bore her words, mahler wondered with a great spreading immobility if he was not made for that sort of affection. his belonged to the land, to his children, to his protection of sagtannet. it was his own shortcoming to analyze but in the interim between his endless thoughts and introspection, he had lost her.
she was cobwebbed with the hundred wounds mahler had pierced through the thin smokescreen of what he had offered as love; he saw it and the blackening valuelessness of it.
nyx did not want him, he believed; she wished the parts of him he could not surrender, and so it was only a fantasy, an idealized version of the careworn man who had sired her children. the love — he was unsure if he could even call it so when so much had embittered the word — shared by mahler and by wylla had almost always been fraught with contention.
and the root of his resentments trailing back to himself; her words had torn down the stones of him one by one, and though his anger was true, the eye of the storm was his own sin.
icewrought winds flowing through the evergreens.
as if slowed, mahler watched through blurred vision as she turned away
— the press of her small paws against the hard earth, the cold grace of her being — she was not going to come back/a final departure/a goodbye threaded into the tension of her small silver frame.
mahler's broad paws flexed against the taiga; helplessly, dumbly, he watched wylla began to fade, as if she were some specter he had not meant to behold, and the stone depths of his cold heart ached with a sickening slash.
"vylla," softly at first, and then again more loudly; he came after her, for mahler could not bear to let her go; it would be the end, the end; i'm done resounding in her ears, and a choking sound welling in his throat,
her name again; and the blind stumble of his granite build after her as she began to tear from his spirit a portion of it shaped in her likeness. words evading him after his discontent and her wrath; he wore one scar of her teeth upon him already, invited more, if only she would stay, stop, stop — "please."