Hideaway Strath is that a tremble on your mouth,

AW (@Vein maybe if you're up for it )

Aerin slowed, her pace only slightly more sluggish than before, carrying the sticky offering of a honeycomb tactfully in her pale jaws. She'd come to find that she could not move as quickly as her stomach grew with her children, though she felt certain that her abdomen was less distended than with her first pregnancy -- but this could have been due to the fact that she had been starving when pregnant with her first litter, or perhaps she wasn't carrying as many pups as last time. This thought didn't bother her in the slightest, the midwife was overjoyed to be expecting at all and would be happy so long as her pups were healthy.

She'd taken to placing sacrifices at the altar where Vein had slain the fawn, the altar-stone still stained dark with the young creature's lifeblood, in hopes that the gods might smile upon her pregnancy and unborn children. The mother would take all the help she could get, determined not to lose these little ones -- she wasn't so sure she could survive losing more of her offspring -- as she was already experiencing a spike in anxiety and suffered bad dreams where her children were born dead and mangled, cursed by her womb as Aliroth had once claimed.

It was as she nudged the sacrifice of beeswax and honey into place, arranging the honeycomb amongst the rest of the trinkets she'd brought in the past weeks (the butterflies from Ramesses, the feather of a turkey, a branch of pine needles, and the remains of a songbird that she'd torn the heart out of), that she felt it for the first time. A tiny tapping, a little flutter like her organs were burbling with some bodily process or rearranging themselves -- stronger than her first litters' movements but that was to be expected given the circumstances.

The hart twisted slightly, glancing around at her baby bump in awe and tenderness as her unborn daughter kicked again -- a little more fiercely which made the sylph chuckle as she reached out, brushing her nose along the swell of her side soothingly to still the little one within. Then she turned her silver gaze skywards, blinking back a sheen of unshed tears. "Thank ye," she whispered to Vein's gods, her gods.