Nova Peak jämmerlich

the deep hue of the fireweed seemed to draw mahler back. this flatter space with its burnt stumps, now ringed with moss and the trickle of blueberries, he had scouted as a rendezvous. it boasted paths that cut upward, and here the gargoyle found himself that day. 
the sun warmed through the ever-present rain that afternoon, sending sideways cascades of gold against the haze of the eternal storm. mahler picked his way carefully over the narrow paths, turned to mud now. the cry of a hawk sounded overhead, and the gargoyle paused to watch it settle in the clutches of golden-green larch trees at the edge of the field, where the trails cut down toward a stream.
what might @Phaedra think of it? she was the oldest of sagtannet's children, a fact he did not enjoy; it showed in her paws and longer limbs and he told himself her more retiring nature was also part of that, though he knew it to be more pronounced than that. a fluted howl for her then; he would let her set the terms of their explorations today.

she was present on one such path when her father's throat unfurled its stentorian peal, insisting upon her company in the swathing fireweeds. her thimble-paws were plucking and slewing along the sedgy terrace of flowers in measured steps, her mind counting each footfall made for no reason other than boredom.
the rain was as perennial as the hardy flowers encompassing her, and there was only so much to do in the rain. most of it involved singing to the worms that surfaced and dancing around them in some pow-wow circuit of adulation. phaedra wasn't much of a puddlejumper, one occassion of being dumped into a deceptively deep mudhole was all it took to rid her of that childhood joy, but she didn't mind getting wet and muddy so she saw no reason to seek the aegis of trees either. 
she watched the very same hawk her father had heard and saw as it plummeted into the rushes. a rabbit made the most terror-stricken scream, then silence reigned, and even the wind seemed to hold its breath. the terrible bird erupted from the grass and beat its wings into the sky again with its rouged quarry clutched between its talons. it circled the larches, and landed amidst them.
her heart paled for caintigern, but she knew he was wise, and growing almost as big and fast as she, and her worry for his prosperity was needless. martens were fierce, and he was the fiercest—albeit only—marten she knew.
phaedra was in no haste to meet her father, but didn't delay his summons for long. once his ashlar silhouette revealed itself at the edge of the field, phaedra picked up her stride to draw silently alongside him.
he was a man she had adored so profoundly in her greenest days; she'd seen him through a lens of innocent perfection. try as he might to cobble what had been broken between them, for all that perhaps she was just too gimcrack. too feeble minded for his like. 
as if she were a child with her hands clasped politely together, phaedra stood patiently and silently rocked back and forth on her dirty soles in wait for him to speak of his need for her.

a little contessa stepping silently from the open door of a carriage, polite and aloof as the edge of a bloom-studded glacier. mahler despaired a little to himself, but did not see fit to wallow. not with such land reaching before them, as of yet unexplored.
and so mahler did not speak, only set upon another gentle swelling trail that led alongside the larchtrees where the taloned skywolf had come to roost. he did not linger here, feeling the springy press of grass underfoot. by and by their towpath began to descend, lowering father and daughter into the heart of the proud trees and their hard bodies.
plainly in the mud before them, the wide, cloven track of a giant ruminant who had wandered through the weald. mahler scarcely knew the word for the beast which had made the mark; he pondered it a short while, nosing over each part of the indentation. 
veering from their pathway, mahler led phaedra up a small rise into an ankle-height stand of pungent juniper, and when his lavender eyes lit upon the massive animal with its palmate antlers, lipping blueberries from verdant leaves, mahler glanced down toward his taciturn edelweiss, wondering at her reaction. the grazing bull was below them now, a distance between he and the wolven pair, but mahler returned his attentions swiftly to the animal, wary and respectful.

he was not inclined to address her, as she had not made the courtesy of doing such herself, and so they wended their way in dignified silence down a path that had larches standing in rows like regimented troops. phaedra glanced above at the raptor, ripping into the rabbit it'd caught with gory zeal. she quickly looked away again. that could have been caintigern, and she couldn't very well climb a tree to save him. he was cunning and streetwise, she needn't worry over him like his mother, but he was her staunchest friend, and the vision had made her stomach into a fist. she bristled her ruff and shook off the tension, catching up to her father's longer-legged lope heading down.
the forest he'd led her through was laden with moisture, squelchy underfoot where water pooled and sank into the soil. when mahler found the spoor, she was tempted to ask what had made such appreciable impressions, but the inscrutable look on his face made her tongue-shy and she hung back while he made a mental inventory of the imprint. she continued to follow him where he wandered. the wet silence of the forest felt very chimerical to phaedra; sunspire's forests were dry and crunchy. this forest was muddy and the leaves were moldering, broken branches speared through mire. 
sighing, boredom was quickly embowering her, and then sadness skewered her heart for it. it wasn't so very long ago that she delighted in joining her father on his roamings, but this didn't feel like home yet, and papa ... well, he was prodigal with his time with children he kept in confidentiality. doubtless, they had similar adventures, but in her childlike self-seeking heart, she could only think of them stealing those adventures from her. did they know she existed? did they know the anguish, or did they bear unassailable hearts? stop stop stop stop stop she chanted inwardly, focusing instead on the hillock they climbed and the juniper crowning it. 
when mahler looked down at her she returned with a quizzical look, an unspoken what?, until her eyes travelled with his own to the massive ungulate gorging on the abundance of blueberries. "oh hey, a moose!" she said baldly, without any exposition whatsoever about how she knew what they were eavesdropping on. she and caintigern had come across one once, but she couldn't tell him that. phaedra bit her cheek and chided herself innermostly.
her tongue welled silver forth, "mama said: the kings of the fores'. guess kings like bueberries, huh?" phaedra blethered before clapping her trap shut and staring forward.

"oho, so you know his name," mahler chuckled lowly, stonewrought expression lit for a moment with a quiet joy only phaedra could ever inspire. pure in her small lisp, her little paws, the way she surveyed the world around them. bittersweet, still, to sense the rift between them that had not always been, and desiring always that he might return to the moment it had been cut between them.
mahler held this as deepest regret, and many he possesed through his comportment across the years. the disappearance of thade had left a furrow upon the face of his soul that he did not think would every truly be healed. but to gaze upon phaedra and not know if she was with him upon this plane they walked — in some small way it barbed mahler in a harsher way.
it was not the fault of her own that they should be like this. the eisen knew well it was his own failing.
"your mother is right," mahler went on softly, wishing to encourage his growing aspentree her voice again. "i vonder how many he could eat." in affable silence he lapsed, watching the moose and feeling rather heartened that phaedra had spoken at all, though he wondered belatedly how she had come by the information.

"'course no," she giggled under her breath, unable to help the trickle of it from her throat, "he hasn' indroduced hisself to me!" her eyes stole brightly across mahler's scar-strewed face, then visibly dimmed as she looked to the ground and fussed with her lips, unrest on her conscience and the thoughts of the afterbears stirring up mixed feelings. it was the depth of her love for him that made this so hard. it was that which made her so selfish. 
her eyes, a mosaic of ameythist and morning honey, peered back over the shrub to watch the moose fare sumptuously on the fruits. "i know ad leas seven hundred five things," she whispered into the vert leaves, more to herself than anyone. it was true—her erudition of the forest was cyclopedic, owing to her secret emprises with the marten and his passing down of wisdom that would keep her safe and perhaps scholarly beyond her years. 
if only she wasn't deficient in what should have been a natural competence of speaking. it improved, but slower than she liked, which only frustrated her to no end ... and recycled her progress towards articulation. 
phaedra nodded at mahler's comment that her mother was right, hoping dearly he had no intentions to enquire of phaedra's previous encounters with moose. "prollably so many he turns indo a fat bueberry," she hummed birdsweet at her own imaginings of this, lips pulling upwards at the corners thoughtfully.
the ungulate didn't appear to have any plans on moving on anytime soon, so she gazed around for a bit. "um, papa?" the girl ventured in a silentious manner, ears flush against her pearly crown; she recalled their last meeting with the orbweavers and her frigid manner toward him. he had said he loved her, and she had never returned the sentiment. it ate away at her mind like maggots. she mulled over her words, and quietly vowed, "ich liebe dich mehr," she set her eyes on the moose's large paddles, never once looking to see what his reaction would be, pitching her ears back over her brows suddenly.
"yanno they eat underwader pants?" she said, remembering her first encounter with a moose had been seeing a cow and her calf sticking their heads underwater to browse on the pondweed and waterlily.

phaedra's gaze had shifted, wylla's poured gold in the watercolor purple that was his own. mahler held them for the eternity that seemed to pass sans the breath held in his chest as she looked to him. for a long moment he felt as though things might be single-stitched in a beaconing toward hope. the shade was ineffably her own, the gargoyle decided, as was the light that played upon her pupils as a joke lilted into the air.
the glow that fell away almost in the same moment, sending mahler plummeting back to the unsurety he now bore seedlike in her presence. for a moment he did not stir, only turned noiselessly back to the moose. woodcoal ear swept at her words, however; amusement despite the suspended severity of their fractured bond stole into his heart. 
his lips moved to answer her commentary upon the impending transmogrification of the great beast, but phaedra sent him again into a coasting of the unexpected. in the words he had taught her, no less. high above her head, though not so high as before — it seemed she grew taller with each moment — the lavender eyes misted.
he wished to turn to phaedra, to speak, to embrace her, but she had only just come to him. mahler then sought logic, and instead only shifted somewhat closer to her with an appreciative brush of his arm that did not long linger, worried he was that she would pull away.
"i did not know that," he commented what felt an eon later. "i vould be interested to know vhere ... they go to sleep," he offered, voice dropping some volume and inching toward conspiratorial. "is it undervader as vell?"

the impulse to withdraw into herself and shrink away was strong when his shoulder touched hers, but phaedra bit her cheeks and held herself genteelly still.
her scruff tousled as the mitts of a lightsome breeze grasped her fur and she turtled her neck at the ticklish sensation, a fair expression of mirth parting from her lips. the moose lifted its great head, jaws mashing the leaves and berries as it stared towards the two with a careless ear flick and inhaling flare of wide-set nostrils.
deja vu. but this wasn't sieger. she thought with a spearing sadness how she would never know how august the stag she had named would come to be, or how many wives would constellate his greatness. she had bequeathed to him a title of dignity, and phaedra dreaded to think she would never know if she had doomed him or granted him a boon in doing so. this made her head drop sadly, though she would have no words to speak for the abrupt slip into melancholy. 
mahler's husk brought her back into the present, and she lifted her pale diadem with flowed ears. she pondered on his question with wry lips and eyes focused on invisible whimsies, then glanced at him when his voice cloaked itself in a conspiring change of timbre. "underwa—" her imagination plunged her into the concept of mermoose and phaedra was swiftly visited by a fit of snorting laughter, "like mooseidon?" she stifled her laughter into softer giggles once remembering they were being quiet now.
after some small moments, she murmured, "i wonder if ever he feels only," a delve into deeper wonderings. her eyes fixed on the ungulate still plying the frondescence without any concern for the wolves. "or if he misses his family," a sigh. she propped her chin on the bush to contemplate life as a moose. it did look lonely in her picturings.
caintigern never once complained of missing his mother. maybe he and the moose were alike in that way. this particular one seemed quite content with its lot in life, but she couldn't help but reflect on more pensive things.

mooseidon.
a glut of chuckles burbled in mahler's throat; he turned his scarred muzzle aside but his shoulders rolled with it until his eyes had watered. for all her distance, phaedra was becoming an innately humorous person. mahler did not connect the cold veil with the transformation; he had uncomfortably reminded him from time to time that the disappearance of thade had caused this.
he could not forget. it had been another singular failure of his own.
ausreichend, the gargoyle told himself wearily, annoyed that he had not gotten to enjoy the moment with her as he had meant. the emotion banked once more into the soot between them, and mahler let himself fully ponder her question and its spun-sugar melancholy.
"i think anyvone might miss their family," he commented softly in a moment or so. "even vone so big as he is." even one so small as phaedra, perhaps, but his mind cut away and away and away in a near-tangible beg for reprieve.
just for now. "perhaps if we could speak his language, ve could ask him."

"perhaps if we could speak his language, ve could ask him."
light bulb! a brilliant opportunity to prove her meritoriousness to her father. surely his chest would swell with pride to see his daughter's stout-hearted endeavor of— 
"ich schaffe das!" she said excitedly, pronking in place on the balls of her feet; mahler's figurative remark was taken as consent to do just as he proposed: simply ask the moose. if she could understand caintigern, why shouldn't she be able to ask a moose a question or two as well? urgent curiosity had already bribed her, besides. 
phaedra was mid-vault over the berry bush without awaiting further enjoinment from her father, cutting a beelining path through the grass in a jogtrot towards the moose with her tail, the pale beam to her waning moon figure, streaming affably. 
the bull was made restless by the advance of the youngling wolf. still a few yards away, he blew through his nostrils as the hairs on his shoulder hump flared. cloven hooves scraped the mud as a warning, but the giant elected to rack across the field instead of charge her, routing a corner and disappearing behind an ensconcement of dense growth. 

whatever humour had been inspired in mahler's heart faded beneath the swift egress of phaedra away from him. tortoise-stunned into a lack of reaction, wide lilac eyes swept after her as his daughter's eager strides carried her toward the moose.
her name, rising and guttering to death in a throat that strained, chords slumping beneath the more immediate leap of his own heavy limbs, to connect and crush against the ruminant if the king was enraged by the subject's descent.
nothing; heart thudding dull in chest, battering ribcage with frantic wingbeats. mahler came to trot alongside phaedra, prickling at the end of each pelt-hair. the beast had turned; it had loped away, and he tore his eyes from its siltwater pelt to his moonbeam girl-child.
"wir lassen ihn in ruhe, ja?" papa suggested in a tone that was not quite a suggestion, broad steps carrying him across phaedra's path. "ich glaube nicht, dass er es genießen würde, in sein bett verfolgt zu werden."

the moose had loomed large, but she was fearless and calmly watched him with a childlike stare of friendly curiosity. i can gentle his might. i know no fear of him. 
fearless or reckless, surely the latter to her father whose panic soon flooded his senses and gaze as he reeled at her dashing forth; he came alongside her shortly with a harrowed aspect as the ungulate departed with a snort and low.
perhaps it was this that had driven the bull anxiously into the rushes, after all. 
the starplucked prinzessin, disappointed but nonetheless acclimated to the sensation of shouldering such chainmail put upon her bodice, looked at mahler and his beard of cobwebby silver, then lowered her eyes with deference. "ja, papa," she conceded. he does not think i can do it.
phaedra's gaze spared a final glance to the trees, then turned from them. "ich glaube nicht, dass mir sein bedt gefallen würde." she added, referring back to their conversation about moose and their aquatic lairs. 
water had never been kind to phaedra, nevermind however much it liked to leak from her eyes. 

mahler, undone, and wondering how he might keep her from such things again. he had forgotten his own childlike wonder; his mnd thought only of danger, of malcontent wickedness that might crush phaedra, break one of her willowing limbs, blind her honeyed lilac gaze. and so he saw not her power, only the caution that he must, must impress upon her now.
but not now.
"unsere betten sind besser," he allowed himself to jest, while the panic of the moment before pounded away between the slats of his ribcage. and he looked toward the mountain, at its jutting head and the rounded, eventual promonotories of its long green spine.

a breath. "aber wir teilen uns das gleiche schöne zuhause." soft, firm, a declaration of coexistence with the taiga's inhabitants. they were the same now, he supposed, and looked to phaedra with a hint of mischief softening the craggy mien of his countenance. "vould you like to go and see the owls i found?"

"vielleicht würde er unsere nicht mögen." between wolf and moose, the matter of accomodations was probably likened to something experienced by goldilocks. 
none the wiser to her father's panic, while mahler took a minute to do pranayama, his daughter had loped a short distance ahead to sniff at the bare patch in the bushes where the moose had cropped plants and berries. the smell of his saliva bid her gums to slaver, though for no reason she was conscious to.
her eyes dropped to the yielding loam underfoot and she realized she was trampling over some mirrored-teardrop trackway. her ears swept over her brow, an intrigued noise coming from her throat. "seine füsse sind grösser als stag's!" she hooted with equal parts amusement and amazement. of course the scale of the moose itself was massive, but being in its hoofprint made that scale even grander. 

"we share the same beautiful home," her father imparted knowingly. phaedra returned to his company, letting the words sink into her mind. were she older, more abstract thoughts may have formed about what made a home, but she wasn't and they didn't. the word just made a nameless feeling in her chest like a sparrow trying to escape a small windowless room. 

don't make things hard. don't make the big stone break into the water, her inner-voice rang, so she said nothing but offered him her gaze. when he cast her an impish look and posed his question, she rejoined with a funny look. first of all, "ja ..." and secondly, "ahm, you sure they s'ill there though?" how did he know they hadn't flown away? she wondered about it with an enticed cant of her head. 

mahler drifted closer, crouched over the wide mark the moose had left. he nodded at its hefty edges, mountains in the mud shoved into existence by the mere plod of the weighty beast. "man ist schnell und man ist stark," he remarked, but his attention was upon her inquisitive look.
"ich habe zwei von ihnen drei tage lang gesehen. kaninchen jagen," mahler added, as it if might sweeten to excess the experience offered.
"have you been to the grotto?" the gargoyle asked then, thinking of the place just near the mountain that had once invited packlife, or so it seemed according to the scattered bones and its new pair of winged inhabitants.
he could not pick a language; it seemed natural to allow things to buoy along a lakebed as they might, surrendering to the control he did not have in this situation and nor did he want, for it was warm between he and his child once more.

phaedra gave him a dubious look at that. "er fängt mich nie ..." she remarked, trailing off with a twist in her snout. the stag she knew was clumsy once, but now probably let her outrun him. 
her eyes widened then, and she did the pee-pee dance on the balls of her feet, though she didn't need to go. being faster than stag meant only one great thing: "ich bin schneller als ein elch!" shot off her mouth, followed by a tittering heeehee of glee. her plumose tail pat the ground. "ich brauche nicht stärder als moosen, wenn man jagt mich, kann ich stag einfach stolpern lassen," the incorrigible girl said with a dark chuckle, a smile impressed charmingly upon her callow features as if her brain wasn't still preparing for such adventures-gone-calamitous with disturbing detail. 
it was not unlike a child to plan on what they would do if gobbled up by quicksand or offered a tour of an icecream truck. just ... with stag involved and acting as her fall guy in every scenario. 
there was a frightening absence of government in phaedra's imagination, when she used it.

his explanation about the owls made her uneasy. if they eat rabbits, do they also eat martens? she worried her lip openly, then got paranoid about her father being able to read her thoughts and pressed her lips together until the seam disappeared into her black gums. "oh." she answered lamely after the lingering pause.
she twisted her foot in the dirt before picking her head up again as he asked her a question. had she ever been to ... the whatto now? her blinking eyes might have answered for her, but her tongue did the labor anyway. "mm. i dunno tha' means," she said, lips silently working on the feel of the word grotto. "so i'unno if i been there." 
caintigern would not trust any place that might imperil him to luck, and phaedra rarely went anywhere without him, so if owls were perilous things to martens, the grotto was certainly unplumbed by the likes of her.

mahler let out a hoot of laughter at her grim pronouncement upon stag in such a situation! he himself dreamt immediately up a more cartoonish picture within his mind, and it continued his chuckles as he tried to settle himself and explain the grotto. "es ist westlich von uns," mahler proferred in a boring start to his essaying description.
"die grotte ist ein kleiner unterirdischer palast." opting to be fanciful a moment, moved by their collective mirth, mahler grew a minute more serious. "nicht wirklich sicher für wölfe, aber viele vögel haben es zu ihrem zuhause gemacht." what would she make of that? he meant to offer a bit of intrigue that might inherit phaedra's interest from more diverting things, such as running headlong toward ruminants able to cut the throat of a bear, mahler imagined. moose then, a dire enemy to sagtannet henceforth, in little jest and much severity.

she watched as her father appeared to empty all the laughter contained within him, her ears disappearing into the pallor of her ruff as she hunched and shared a snorting giggle. a rare side of her often self-possessed father to see and it excited her to stir him into the heartened emotion. it made her feel warm; she would need to remember to brainstorm other scenarios in which stag was in danger of extinction to further elicit such a response from him.
west, phaedra pondered. "wie man weiss, wo westen ist?" the start was not as boring as he might think. she knew right and left, but nothing about more advanced navigation, and as always, meddlesomeness insisted itself into her conscious when he was informed of something she wasn't.
he continued on to mention something about a palace and she gazed lingeringly at the fruitful glade that embosomed them. unbidden, with wonder, her lips silently mouthed palast. then, his tongue was laden with the gravitas that such a quest would ensure no safety for them and she glanced up, excitement replenished by the element of danger.
owls or no, she must go there!
phaedra leapt up and sought to crowd his personal space, shifting her petite paws to balance them on his own like a little girl being led in dance on her father's shoes during a ball. "können wir gehen? ohh! können wir bitte?" she pleaded, serving him the best doe-eyed gaze her expression could muster.
as an afterthought, she pledged: "i will behave in the groddo. i will!" 

mahler considered phaedra's question carefully, even as a shift of his heavy paws saw fit to point them grottobound. "es ist eine innere art von gefühl," he began. directions and their points were taught, and then internalized, insofar as he might see.
it almost felt as though little had come between them — mahler reveled in this feeling as they paced between the stands of yellowbark trees, the scent of taiga loam and impending frost upon the wind buoying him somewhat. sagtannet had found its place to settle, it seemed. the months to come would shift such for him, and for wylla, but now there was no awareness of this.
"schau hoch," the gargoyle urged, not into the eye of the sun, but the way it tuned the shadows cast by the treeline to their eyes. "die sonne geht im osten auf und geht im westen ins bett." an old adage, but one that had not yet failed mahler. a look to phaedra now; he held himself back from his usual loquacious explanation, waiting to ensure she followed the trail of his thought.

an inner type of feeling. thanks dad, super helpful! couldn't teach her to track the celestial phases, for the line between the two horns of a crescent moon was approximately east-west, or look for flora that appreciates drier microclimates, for southron directions, or even something apropros to one of their former meets: how orb-weavers oft constructed their webs on an east-west plane, yielding south and north facing sides, and how that was another way to get one's bearings. 
but how was she meant to go by a feeling? phaedra pouched her lips and twisted her mouth, casting her gaze in all four directions as they wended their way through the golden birch, seeking this owl manor.  "hope they are 'specting us, them owls," she put forth for the sake of casual conversation, lolloping ahead of mahler— but only just so. 
look up, father said, and so phaedra stopped and did as she was told. "up here?" she immediately stared directly at the blazing ball in the sky and just as quickly shaded her watering eyes with a paw, "oouh die sonne ist spicy anzusehen," she blinked away the tears shedding unbidden from her eyes while also lending her ears to her father for his wisdom regarding the cardinal points.
antique remark or no, it was the first she'd heard it, and curiosity thrid through her features.  
the girl mulled over his comment for a moment, scritching the dirt in museful thought, then raised her head and panned along the trees and their more distant adumbral rootmates. "in the— in the day—" her brows furrowed. "so wheres the sun go when is dark?" she asked, one eye squinching towards the daystar. 

mahler should have applied himself more in this moment to a proper education, but he found that with phaedra he oft lingered in the before-time of their earlier affability. it was the future now, beyond all the mistakes he had made, and dealing with their aftereffects had proven a challenge for his wistful mind.
mahler focused now upon this moment before him, upon the delicate and endearing snib of phaedra's words and how she had taken so to his mothertongue. an age-old question she had posed, and none more difficult to answer. for a moment he only skimmed her features for some indication she would be open to theory, and then he tilted his head.
"have i told you the story of how the sun decided vhere to make his bed, phaedra?" he was certain that he had told her stories, though the titles and natures and times of those had faded to him. gimlet-jawed a moment in shame, he returned to himself, and gestured downward where the trail began to narrow and drop away. 
the grotto would be a climb, but they were still a small distance off. and so the gargoyle pressed on, waiting in a hopeful flounce for his snowflower to invite his rusted storytelling.