The Sunspire another day, another doug

It was a tossup between eagle, fox, coyote, or bees. Coyote won, but I’m still going to find a way to magically shove all these things into one post. LMFAO. Thank you for letting me play Oaxaca, my little kiwi man, and easing me back into puppy adoption. ♥

Please let Olive post first. [He is still alive, at this point.]

A sweet, sticky scent attracted Oaxaca’s attention, and he ambled away from mama with his Beyoncé hips shimmying voluptuously from side to side behind the rolling barrel of his abdomen. [ Waistline? What waistline? ] He stopped at the base of a very tall tree, oversized paws planted against the gnarled wood, cocking his head this way and that at the strange droning bzzz that filled the air above him. He could see little dots in the air and knew them to be some kind of bug — but he didn’t know whether these ones were the delicious kind or the never-put-in-mouth-again kind. The sweet smell seemed to be coming from up there, though, so I mean, odds are, they fell into the former category. “Hey — bug?” he inquired casually.

No answer. Well, they looked busy, anyway.

Untroubled, Oaxaca busied himself with a new task: finding something pretty to take home for mama. Ever since the other day, she’d been different in a way that her thirdborn couldn’t define. He was so innately connected to her rhythm and her rhyme that he knew things just weren’t right — not that she shirked in her care of her children. If anything, she was more nurturing and more protective. If he’d possessed the vocabulary and the wherewithal to use metaphors, he might’ve said her song was out of tune.

The cry of an eagle overhead didn’t trouble Oaxaca, who hadn’t lived long enough to fear them; and he bypassed this threat by sheer luck — or maybe the eagle saw him and was like, “Yeah, no, that looks really heavy and I just have a shopping basket, and I mean, I could go get a cart, but I’d have to walk all the way back to the front of the store, so I’m gonna have to pass.” He watched with rapt fascination as the staggeringly large bird of prey descended upon something much more portable — a fox kit — and had the good sense to run back toward mama, gift or no gift. It was on his way back to @Olive that the fourth horseman struck.

A coyote, long of ear and bushy of tail, clipped Oaxaca as he bumbled across the familiar terrain; the pain was so great it shocked a scream out of the boy who never cried, though the high-pitched wail clotted in his throat — she was coming again! He wedged himself between the cracked roots of a tree and trembled, blood bubbling brightly at his nostrils. Her lower fangs had connected with the blunt angle where his muzzle-bridge met the dome of his skull — fortunately his eyes were intact — and her upper fangs had scored the flesh at the base of his skull where it met his nape. Now he turned, trying to get away, and her sharp teeth grabbed for his jutting hind limb. She yanked, and at first there was a searing pain — worse than when she’d bitten his face — but very quickly there was nothing. Strangely, he couldn’t seem to move anything below his waist. He didn’t realize that he was bleeding out — she had severed the femoral artery. Everything was beginning to get hazy, but mercifully, he didn’t feel anything anymore — just a weird sort of urgency that he wanted his mama.

She was probably already on her way, but he bleated for her anyway. “Mama? Mama!”

But it was not mother that came upon Oaxaca’s plight; it was his sister, the little grey girl, that found him so! It was with the utmost innocence that she wandered upon him — as they grew older, and the more mama and seabreeze were distracted with the new babies, the three siblings were allowed to wander a wider perimeter, and the little avant-garde was taking full advantage of such freedoms.  She pushed the boundaries often because she was never chastised for it; in fact, there was had been nothing that would not have qualified as anything but the utmost happiness. No yelling, and nothing but love. In fact her first sadnesses might have been when Seabreeze was feeling sick or when mama cried over the dark, dead stranger — but nothing that derailed the overall vibe too much.

Eleuthera heard the scream from not too far away and immediately her feet skittered into a bolt towards the epicenter of the sound — she knew it was her brother, knew it deep within her bones, and her body simply reacted to it as if he had called for her specifically. She charged closer, an unfamiliar gripping in her stomach that made her want to stop and puke, or shit, or both. She knew something bad had happened before she even knew what the concept of ‘bad’ was. 

If the coyote was nearby, the panic-stricken Eleuthera did not see it — perhaps it was out of view, circling around to finish the job. Her aquamarine eyes, held open and gaping, saw the familiar, calico form of her brother with a pool of crimson blood, growing ever-larger; like it had with the dying man. Was Oaxaca dying? Eleu took a faltering step forward, then hauled in breath and yelled for Olive. “Mudder, mudder! Come, mudder!” she screamed, and then rushed to close the distance. She needed to comfort him, to somehow fix this! She was simply to young to know that the thing that happened to Oaxaca, could also happen to her.

“Elle,” he said with some difficulty, his tongue dumb and thick in his dry mouth. His voice sounded stuffy, and the wet-sounding snuffle that punctuated his sister’s nickname produced a fizzle of blood that soaked into the pale fur of his muzzle and dripped down his chin. “Come in here,” he ordered her, but all the syllables slurred together, giving him a horrendous accent to try to type — and you know how much I hate trying to type accents. It was kind of like, “c’m’n’r,” — like if you tried to say “commoner” but without any vowels.

His eyes rolled back, and his head followed suit in a manner that almost seemed dysphoric, but he held on — as much as he could — and mumbled something indecipherable.

I’M VERY EMOTIONAL RN.

As the grey little girl neared her dying brother, her quick sprint slowed to a faltering crawl as fear struck deep in her belly. Revulsion was felt deep within Eleuthera’s factorable psyche, though she did not yet have the ability to identify it yet — there was something about the scarlet liquid that spilled from his hindquarters that did not sit well with her. It smelled sweet, unlike anything she had experienced prior to meeting the dead, dark man… but it clearly signified something awful, if it could make mother react the way she had before.

Eleuthera could not entirely understand what Oaxaca said, but at her fading sibling’s prompting, she moved closer. She placed a miniature paw on his shoulder and gave him a gentle shove, hoping to rouse him. He seemed awfully tired, didn’t he? “Brudder…” she murmured, not sure what else to do to make the situation better. She placed her other paw upon the calico boy’s shoulder and gave a hard shove. That usually got him moving — @Séamus had shown her that trick.

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It was the call no mother ever wanted to hear: the call of her child in distress. Dread struck fiercely in her heart — worse than it had when Dakarai came a-knockin’ on Sunspire’s door; worse than when the blackfeather bitch had scarred her face, worse than when she had been banished from the first home the wandering druid had ever known. She felt like she knew before she actually knew, and the ghost of worry that she always felt for the wellbeing of her cubs metamorphosed into a spirit, a specter, which entered her and lighted her movements with horror.  Then, there were two calls for her.

Her legs simply could not bring her to the epicenter of the bleating fast enough.

It was a scene that had played out far too often recently, and with far too many wolves she held dear. Oaxaca, her little boy, dying amidst a growing pool of crimson blood. It was a sickening reminder of what had happened before, but the recent memory never crossed the stricken woman’s mind. In fact, no thought cross her mind except for an internal screaming that would not stop. 

Standing over him and Eleuthera, who attempted to jostle her brother back to life, Olive let slip the smallest whisper. It surprised her that the scream did not come out instead. Words would not come out either. They remained lodged in her throat, not wishing to validate the reality of Oaxaca’s situation with her inane comments.“No…” she said, placing her nose upon his head as it rested in a way that did not appear natural. He was dying.

“No—” Olive said with more force.

With a swipe of her forearm, and without much thought of her daughter, Olive shoved Eleuthera aside. “Move!” she barked, and brought the bleeding child into her arms and, within .01 of a second, examined the wound upon his leg. The femoral artery had been severed — and when that happened, there was no hope for recovery. It was a move that the druid often employed when she was forced to take down prey, as it was a quick and relatively painless death, as she understood. Now, more than ever, Olive wished that to be true.

“My darling, my boy,” she stammered in a voice that was as uneven as the terrain of the Sunspire. Time here was precious, as was Oaxaca’s fading life-force. There was so much to be said, so much that she wanted him to know… but in the end, it all boiled down the most sincere  

“I love you so.”

Haka had begun to drift in and out of consciousness by the time Olive pushed Eleuthera aside and cradled him close, but his sister’s fierce shove and his mother’s brisk jostling anchored him temporarily to the fleeting present. “Hi, Mama,” he slurred, his head bobbling weakly. “Look.” He tipped his head toward the sky, which seemed to blur with colors previously unseen; he didn’t have names for them all, but did she see how pretty they were? As if summoned by his fleeing spirit, three fledglings burst clumsily into the sky after their wide-winged mother. A perennial smile shaped his pale, bloodied lips and stayed there when he turned to look at the mist-shrouded druidess. “Mama, music,” he murmured inanely, too weak now to pull himself closer. He rested his nose on her paws, and as his heart began to slow, “Music,” he mumbled again, “singin’…don’t worry…‘bout a thing.”

He was so tired now — he couldn’t remember ever being this tired before. His tongue poked out to swipe across his nares, and the blood there lent a false sense of ruddy health to his paling mouth. “Every little…thing…” he eked out muzzily, his eyes going glassy, “all right, mama.” Then, quite suddenly, he seemed to struggle against the close of sleep; his forequarters thrashed briefly before the fight went out of him and the fear that had manifested itself briefly upon his fragile features was replaced with his usual lazy smile.

Oaxaca Shakti drew a breath so deep his round little belly swelled with it, and when he let that breath out, it seemed his spirit went with it, as rollicking and easygoing as the tide.