Whitefish River i spend hours in the garden & learn to live the unimaginable

late evening of july 19th
all tags for reference

Tears by manner of stilled salt gleamed in the cradle of a slumberless Aurëwen’s dark lashes; the silver lain for a time in the dampened embankment, the rivertide ensnaring her delicate hinds with deceptively-tender tugs. Whatever quarry she’d meant to do away with for the caches lies far from her, forgotten;
she is naked in her shame, a feeling as abysmally endless as the hour or minute or moment ticks by.

What creature now is she, that @Ira and @Evergreen have so benevolently taken into their good graces?
Not a mother. She can’t be a mother,
must be a mother, meant to be a mother, don’t deserve to be a mother—

The herbalist is shuddering and stilling with her laments until, forevers later, her heaves reside into hushed sorrowing.
Without @Dragomir to tether his mother to reason and logic, she pined to have all of her melted away by the molten kiss of @Vercingetorix; to be smothered by the spitfire embrace of their Isilmë—
but at such a time when everyone was so scorched, she was very much convinced they were too sensitive to touch. Too agrieved,
so all the desecrated could do was to raise scarred, sandy lips and mouth nothings to each and every star she’d once followed.

They call to her, as they once had when she’d first stept into these Wilds; as they’d had brought her to the basilisk and likewise from it; as they’d brought her night-of-life and their children to them. Like the waning, unending darkness between all of them — not just stars, anymore — she is hollowed, emptied entire.

The waters haven’t given her anything.
They've just continued to take and drown.

And so they continue to wash against her hips in a soft, whispering sough.
She could not sleep, and all her tears had been spent; not when this undertow of anguish refused to let her family breathe.