Noctisardor Bypass ich muss dir sagen

mahler moved through the ashtone fields. flowers had been gathered nearby, laid out neatly by color with his usual medicinal methodry to his movement. 
today the man worked slowly, compelling himself not to think of the moments that flowed by him. each one could not be wasted. each one must be dedicated to one task or another. it was how he had driven himself for some time, and it was not something mahler could change.
he dragged a pair of indigo flowers toward the heap of purple, glanced toward the mound of azure. he decided it fit nowhere and began another collection.
that morning a fit had come upon him. it was only through some grace that there had been no one to witness his collapse in the cool shadows of dawnleaf. he had woken with throat raw and mouth metallic, weakened from the endless rack of sorrowed breaths. 
but during that time he had dreamed, half-conscious of the sun arranging its consistent arc across the sky. he had dreamed of jet waters and crimson trees, of faces calling for him, paws reaching for him. he found himself standing in a field of stark white trees against black grass, ghostly, but he felt no fear. 
it was only when he finally awoke that the dread returned.
mahler cut an orange blossom slowly, feeling the click of teeth together, and thinking in a sudden spate of anger how hale he had been only some months before. 
the sticking cough had begun its wasting. it was only through some grace that his coat had begun to thicken and change, covering the diminished musculature and the new sharpness of his hipbones. he should have been ravenous but was not, and yet he ate as much as ever, packing weight back into the fresh furrows where his flanks struggled to remain. 
mahler refused.
sundown arrived, and with it a shifting of light, which turned all the flowers only to gold and mahler as well. the warmth of the golden light was peaceful upon his roughened pelt and the side of his face, which suddenly was wet and tense with a sudden saltwater rush that he would not examine.
the gargoyle thought with his old longing of @Wylla, never far from the forefront and throne of his living mind.

Paddling against the current, Wylla crossed the river separating thick pine woods from sprawling meadow and dragged herself up onto the other bank, only to trot on without shaking out the water. The sun was sinking steadily behind the surrounding cliffs, but it was still warm enough that the water on her skin was comfortable. The spare nature of her fur lent itself well to natural drying; within minutes it was already beginning.

By the time she stumbled across Mahler, her fur was only damp and sticking up every which way on the wind's whim. She saw him huddling there, limned in a golden halo, and hesitated. Her heart beat hard, but her mind cut sharply across any girlish inclination she had to heed that organ. Wylla had tried forgiveness once before and found nothing worthwhile for the trouble. It did not agree with her, not one little bit.

So, knowing he had likely seen her when he lifted up his head and finding she didn't care overly much what he thought of it, Wylla turned and headed for the trees around the pharmacy. If he needed her for some legitimate reason, she trusted he would call out, and if it was only to lecture her or spout more bullshit excuses why everything was always her fault, then she had a head start on walking away.

mahler lifted his head and saw her, saw her as clearly as if she had heard his thought. the sight of her small lithe body with silvergrey fur slicked against her hard muscles, accentuating the hips and flanks he had not touched in so long a while — wylla brought him vitally and desperately alive with a thudding low pulse that belied the weakening of his large frame.
she had always done so.
"wylla!" mahler called out, hurrying toward her stiff gait and the steel set of her spine. in his jaws was not the bouquet he had thought to slowly, carefully make; only a trio of flowers hastily gathered; orange, blue, rose; spinning together at the corner of his mouth.
he set them down. "how vas your trip?" mahler, ignoring — not ignoring, palpably aware — of why she had gone and why she had come back; the gargoyle, harried and warily eager and almost pathetically boyish as he waited for her to answer, to give him any rejoinder at all.

Irritation and hope and longing and revulsion clamoured all together inside Wylla's brain at the sound of her name in his mouth, and after what he had done! Half of her screamed that she ignore him and keep walking. There was nothing for her here, and she had wasted ample time waiting on Gustav Mahler to rise to the occasion.

The other half of her noticed right away that he had not called her Vylla this time, and that part gently took the reins and steered her in a slow turn, ending with her looking back at him, expression flat. That she lacked anything resembling enthusiasm at the sight of Mahler was plain, even when her eye dropped to the flowers that he placed gently on the ground. Some herbalist thing he was working on, no doubt.

It was impossible to ignore that there was something decidedly more haggard about Mahler lately, but Wylla chalked it up to his usual weariness. It must be incredibly tiresome to uphold the heavy mantle of his infuriating masculinity and pride, and yet, somehow Wylla doubted he would ever set it down. That was all she chocked it up to, even when Phaedra's grave voice floated across her mind. Just another man throwing himself a pity party.

It was fine, she said noncommittally, dangling that ever so dangerous word, fine, like a lure between them. A few weeks ago she had entertained thoughts of romance, a quiet evening by the water with a pair of ducks, perhaps some long-forgotten intimacy. Now she felt tension squeezing her spine tightly between her shoulderblades and cinching around her neck. Her gaze lingered on the flowers for a beat, then lifted to his face, chilly and mistrustful. Did you need something?

wylla turned toward mahler with the cardboard reception he had expected. but somehow, despite the fact that the gargoyle finally understood, much too late — he could not stop the little eddies of pain inside him, or the ones that ate at the back of his eyes.
the part of mahler that always chose to walk away or to say nothing, the proud rot charring its way through their relationship: it spoke now, insisting that wylla did not care. why bring vulnerability to the woman only for her to cast it away? or trample it, more likely. 
but it was deserved. and it was in knowledge of this deserving that mahler pressed on. 
now he grappled with blurting out his words so they could both be done and he could retire among his clipped flowers, the piles of blue and red and sage-green.
"vill you come and talk vith me? please?"
the ignominious we need to talk or i have to tell you something felt too dire and too demanding, and at any rate mahler —
oh, what was the point of saying anything at all? and yet he waited, finally flicking the shadow-smudged lilac of his eyes toward the cold, distant sun of her gaze.

It was quite possible that blurting out what he needed to say was best for both of them, because Wylla went instantly on the defensive when he asked if she would speak with him. The last time he asked that, he proceeded to blame her for someone else's drama stirring and poor behaviour. Nothing good ever came out of having any kind of serious talk with Mahler. Why should today be any different?

But after several beats of debating whether she should give him a healthy dose of his own medicine by just walking away from him, like he often had to her, Wylla relented. It happened with a sigh and visible defeated sagging of her figure, like she was exhausted of running this circuit with him time and time and time again. If she had never met Mahler, if he had never come to Grimnismal, would her life be better now, or worse?

Some good had come out of all this, namely Phaedra and Thade, but what pain might she have avoided?

What? she asked lowly, gravelly, fully expecting yet another lecture on how she should live her life and why she should grovel to those who never bothered to give anything to her in return.

mahler was suddenly dizzy with relief and chagrin: he saw the edges of her figure tense into steel and silver. and while he had wanted them to sit among the flowers, all he managed to do for a moment was stare down at the ones he had dropped between them.
blue blurring into rose-edge; suddenly it was his own gaze blurring, and he fought for the waterline beneath stoneflower eyes to be dried, to be empty, when he lifted his head to look at her again. and as it had always been, mahler saw settlement when he looked at wylla. peace, despite all. the one-time promise of an eden he had razed with the fire of his pride and destroyed for them both; and even beneath the way he had tormented her she still smote him with the essential and very pristine refusal to exist on any terms but her own. 
as she always had.
 mahler suddenly felt the spear-point of grief lodging terribly just beneath his breastbone, palpably, tangibly painful.
"i am dying, i think."
the words hung like spiderwebbed glass on the inside of his arteries; the moment he felt them cut from his throat, mahler wanted very badly to take them back. "i am telling you because — i know you are here for phaedra, and she is of an age to go vith you vhen — or now. she may not vant to stay, i — cannot see her staying."
ah — he was stumbling again, and shut his mouth hard so that the great muscle beneath his jawline leapt, and stared down with nausea spreading faster and faster until it felt he might faint, or be faint, or in any way waver.
and then there was nothing else to say.

For a long time, Mahler said nothing. Wylla traced his gaze down to the three flowers scattered between them. One resplendent orange blossom, a sunburst over the sea of blue beside it. The ocean never sported so pure a colour. The rose lay next to both, and Wylla swallowed thickly. The colour of blood, and the colour Wylla associated with her life, every prick of pain she had ever felt, wrapped up in the thorns adorning its stem.

She followed Mahler's gaze back up and stared levelly at him. She thought she knew the sum of every word that ever could come out of his mouth. It always came back around to the same conclusion: that they were not right for one another and would be doing each other a favour if they never locked eyes like this again.

Nothing could ever prepare her for what he said instead. Those words yawned abyssal between them and Wylla felt pieces of herself sloughing off in the wake. The piece that felt she should have remained in Grimnismal instead of letting Caiaphas and Nyx dictate her self-worth enough to leave. The piece that felt she should have accepted him into her life when he found her and Tiercel, that perhaps he was the missing piece that bridged the chasm between her eldest and her. The piece that wondered if she had made the right decisions in her life, or if she should have chosen a different path.

The piece that dreamed of laying alongside him in the setting sun, watching young ones running around in the field with Phaedra and Thade and even Tiercel looking over them, spinning away on the breath of his admission, an ember curling at the edges.

If Mahler felt nauseous while he rambled on about Phaedra, it had nothing on the sense of impending doom and panic welling up in Wylla's stomach. What was she supposed to do with this news? Pretend that every moment they shared wasn't squandered by one or the other, both curdling with their own pride and stubbornness? Move on and waste not another second on the dead end that pursuing Mahler was proving to be? Break down at his feet?

It was the cold clasp of steel logic that first found Wylla, who quavered in place, but her voice was unwavering and accusing when she said, so, what? You're just gonna give up and let it happen? As if death was something you could just will away. As if Mahler had any power over it. I thought you were a healer, god damnit!

"i am," he tried to insist, but his voice broke in the middle because he was not yet ready to weep. "i am," mahler said more firmly, drawing a breath that threatened to stir the crumbling tomb-dust taste of the cough from his chest, and along with it the creeping terror that had silently begun to take hold of him.
"no, vylla!" his accent, thickening inexorably as he looked sharply at her face. he did not expect her to exult him to more. mahler did not live in the tempting martyrdom of thinking she would rejoice at such news. she was too kind beneath the layers of basalt, too good, more alive than he, to take pleasure in the suffering of even someone who had cost her so much.
this was his truth, whatever else the actual one might be.
"i am not ... ready to simply give up. but i have been treated by three healers, not including myself. i mean only — verdammt! —" coursing under his breath; echoing wylla.
"i vant only to be realistic."
mahler thought starkly now that he should not have said anything, that he only should have gone off to die. but the unfairness of that not only to her but to phaedra and the little ones and those he loved in rivenwood: they who had suffered enough loss should suddenly be without again. he had little doubt that the bypass would rally, and do what was necessary for the good of their children, all of them. but it was too cruel a picture to paint at the end of his life, and would have been another selfishness.
"i vill ... seek a thousand medicines if it matters," mahler breathed, a quick, harsh, humourless smile tearing at his mouth. "but i do not think it can be cured. the symptoms can only be held at bay for a time. vhat do i know, however? i am only a midvife."
he meant it as some sort of crass, misplaced joke; it emerged bitter, the taste of early currants, and his gaze cut sharply toward anything but the accusation of her stare.

He said he wasn't ready, but Wylla wondered how true that really was. He was making contingency plans, which meant it was bad. Bad enough for him to see no way out of it. Most of his words fell on deaf ears, not because Wylla didn't want to listen, but because things were rapidly spiralling out of control and it was a struggle enough to keep herself from hyperventilating.

Now that she knew, it seemed obvious His fur was hiding it, but he had lost weight. His eyes were more dull than usual. Even his voice rasped with the ghost of illness beneath it, all things she had not noticed until Phaedra mentioned the cough. And even then, it was likely Wylla overlook it all, but to know he thought it would kill him—!

She knew he probably wanted the terminus of his life to be meaningful in some way, spent with loved ones. Who wouldn't want that? But Wylla, well, she nodded her brisk agreement that he would try a thousand medicines. In the morning, she said, trying her best to whisk her own fear away and failing to keep it from her voice when her throat tightened and strained, I will go, and search for someone who can fix this.

And if there was no one, if he was right and it could not be fixed with medicine, then she would find another way. Mahler's death would affect so many wolves, but Wylla's life amounted to nothing. If she found a possibility of trading the remainder of her life for his ... She was willing to try anything. She wasn't ready to lose him, not before she even got to have him.

Not before she could look out over the water with him over a meal of ducks and tell him she wanted him to be hers, not in the heat of the moment, but in a moment of peaceful tranquility.

mahler wanted to tell her not to waste time outside the bypass, to remain here for phaedra. but gratefully, and at long last, the gargoyle first saw that for what it would be: a rejection. he had always known there was love between them, still, still — he was a fool to deny it, despite how wrapped in nettle and bracken it had become.
no —
what he had let it become.
the graf's eyes suddenly grew bright with a lilac mist of tears, the ones he could no longer hold back; he stared hardened and silent, skyward, as the corners of his mouth trembled. she would watch him fight against them until he could not any longer. mahler's face contorted into a sob. he sought to save himself by slicing his eyes down to cut against the earth, to close.
"ich fühle mich wie," he began, stuttering between tongues as was his wont; speaking only when composure found him after that single strangled sound — "you are alvays taking care of me. and i have never taken care of you like that."
body, yes; mahler saw the wasted years of not having nourished her spirit, and hated himself for only seeing it now, selfishly poised at the edge of a void he could not fathom.
"i vant to tell you to take phaedra and leave, now. i know how cruel it sounds, vylla, i truly do. but you understand." he was breaking again, and this time he did not hide himself. "vhy should her memories of me only hold more pain, atop everything else? or yours. you know — you know i must argue," a curt, depthless chuckle, gravel tossed into the bottom of a pit. the ocean sluiced in angered channels along his face.
or a grave.
and then the sundering. he hung his head.
a fitting punishment indeed.

Wylla didn't catch Mahler's meaning, and didn't care to. She couldn't think of much else but the way his face dropped and saltwater etched his greying fur. It dug painfully into her heart, more painfully than anything he had done or said that got her back up or made her feel abandoned or misled. She didn't realize tears were coursing down her own cheeks until she shook her head, fiercely, and felt them fly from her eyelids.

No. She grated it between gritted teeth, feeling her hackles lifting on the back of her neck. Phaedra would want to be here. We're not going anywhere. Except her, of course. Wylla could not wait idly by and watch Mahler waste away without exhausting every resource to try to save him. He had saved her life on more than one occasion, even when all she wanted was to die. In return, she sowed resentment and mistrust.

Suddenly, Sequoia and her pettiness seemed the smallest concern in the world.

I will find someone, she reiterated between breaths that grew more rapid and uncontrolled with each ticking second. I will. I'll ... I'll find Caiaphas if I must. You have saved my life, I will not stand by and watch you lose yours and I will not walk away like some ... some coward! She had something the seawitch wanted — namely, her life — and Wylla suspected Caiaphas would do what she wished in exchange for it. She had made up the witch's curse when she told Heda about it, but Wylla had no doubt that Caiaphas possessed some otherworldly ability to stave off death. There was no way she could have survived so long if she did not.

A healer with knowledge of a wasting cough would be better, but if Wylla had to barter her life for his, she would do it. No one would miss her half as much as they would miss Mahler, Phaedra included. That was what she felt anyway. Maybe there truly was no cure, but even prolonging his life would be something. For Wylla, who did not believe in an afterlife, death was a slamming door, and she was not ready.

Are you afraid of anything, Aunt Willam? Abruptly, Wylla came face-to-face with what frightened her most.

caiaphas.
mahler wanted to laugh, for he had always been terrified of the salt-hag, and somehow into old age. but he saw now his fear had only been at her fearlessness, the complete absence of anything like mediation. caiaphas had belonged to the dark grey waves and blackpines of grimnismal, as much as wylla had ever been.
"i missed my chance to go vith you to the ocean," mahler realized aloud. the words felt gauzelike and muffled upon the inside of his tongue. he watched her weep until something further gave, and he simply could no longer only see — he reached blindly for her, charcoal ears with the nicks and notches of long years falling flat against his heavy skull as he sought the only succor he had ever truly been given.
and for once it was not regret that burned him, it was resolution. 
mahler did not believe he could be saved, but he had always held to them, to the cornerstone of what they had become and had remained. he twined himself tightly against her small and eternally haptic body and whispered that he was afraid, that the cowardice in him had always been just that, terror of horizons over which he could not see.

Being alone, had been Wylla's answer, when what she meant to say was dying alone. She knew now that she would die alone a hundred times if it meant not having to live in a world where Mahler was not. She would take a thousand lectures and a million small betrayals over having to watch him go so prematurely. Lusca's everlasting vitality had planted in her daughter a false hope that all should be so long-lived, but now she was forced to acknowledge that most wolves died much younger, and much more brutally.

To die of sickness surrounded by helpless loved ones was surely the worst way to go. And she had squandered the last year in anger, no matter how dignified.

Wylla could say nothing in response. All she could do was breathe and fight to push herself back from the edge of a panic attack. It wouldn't help anyone for her to spin out here. Mahler seemed to sense as much, for suddenly he was pressed tight against her, bringing a fresh wave of sorrow and longing and imminent loss that forced her to bury her face into his chest. There, she imagined his heartbeat like a bomb — the way he spoke, it could stop any second.

He whispered that he was afraid, making her gut ball up as tight as any fist she might have thrown at him in anger so many times before. She shook her head against the heat of him. No, she said, defiant. No. We can still go. He couldn't think he was going to waste that quickly, could he? How long had he known? Somewhere deep inside there was anger, too, anger that this should happen, anger that he had not told her and had let her push him away again. When you're better, we'll go.

it would be far more peaceful he felt to simply resign himself to whatever followed, to fight through these days at her side until he found and created closure. far easier to give in than to fight. he knew a great part of it was the marrow-sent exhaustion that had jarred through him for so long.
he had thought he wanted to lie down in the good rich soil of rivenwood and die — until wylla was trembling and swinging her small head to and fro, burning with the paladic fire of a healing valkyrie. 
she captured his attention, held him in a stasis that did not allow him to deny her again.
"vhen i am better, ve vill go." he repeated it, held the words like a talisman against the ridges of his teeth. "i have only told you," he said after some heartbeats of time, galloping into the medical to escape the hurt of the realm in which they dwelled, the words tumbling velvet and saddened against her ears.
a long silence. mahler breathed the good and deep scent of wylla, of the bypass's stone, of the forests he had come to know by name. even if the salt of the sea still clung to her in some way, all he beheld was the vital and the visceral which had so placed his heart into her care many years ago.
he felt himself entrusted to her now; still resistant for it felt as though he had not earned this.
earning. entitlement. two sides of a wicked coin.
mahler inhaled a trembling breath and swallowed, finding no more sounds in him for now. he wished only to exist in in the insistent, warring warmth of her embrace; to only see each moment as one of gold he wanted to give only her.

She couldn't say why, of all the truths Mahler had spoken and all the times she had rebuffed him, this was the truth she chose to believe. She feared death so greatly that she could not imagine anyone ever lying that they were bound for it. That, or the better part of her, buried under all those nettles and burrs, knew he would never hurt her with a lie.

Whatever the cost, Wylla would pay it. She resolved to as she held him and began to spiral into desperate bargaining in her own head. Never another argument, if only he lived. Never would she doubt his words again, if only he lived. Never would she raise her voice in anger, if only he lived.

A ragged breath tore at her throat. Let him never tell another soul. Let Wylla find some way to save him so no one else would ever have to know that he was dying. She knew everyone had to die eventually, but ... Not before her. She had to be the first to go, out of all of them, out of Mahler and Tiercel and Phaedra and Thade and even Lycaon, out there, wherever he was. Let her perish before Lusca, no matter how improbable. She knew she could not bear to lose any of them, and was too cowardly to face the pain of it.

That was how her resolve clicked into place and bid her to draw back, to look into the misty lilac of his gaze. So beautiful, so peaceful a colour, and melded flawlessly into hers in the eyes of their daughter. She had never really noticed before, but if red was the colour of Wylla's life, then lilac was the colour of her love.

Be mine, Mahler, she whispered. It was not the romantic and sweet proposal she had wished for every time he posed it in anger and desperation. This was desperate in its own way, because tomorrow the chance might pass her by, and she could not live to regret it. She meant it completely.

curious, that such a thing as time could be so unknowable and yet wreak so very much.
mahler's pragmatism could not carry him to the determined threshold where wylla stood, a silver-clad paladin ready to turn her eternal sword against the sickness that had risen in his chest.
mahler loved her for it, fiercely "yes," he choked out against the moongilt of her ruff. he lifted his lips to trace each brow, lovingly and equal around both her eye and the charcoal shadows where the other had been — lost in service to sagtannet. not lost, given! sacrificed for the mountain as well as his defense — avenging him.
then to her honed shoulders; he meant to soothe the blades of them with his caress.
mahler did not and could not care who came upon them in that moment. the world had fallen back into the velour of the lightstruck way in which all his regard for her cascaded around him.
as if his love at last was fully felt and experienced without the veneer of tiny steel chains which had covered its face for so long, a netting of metal and thorn.
gone.
he had belonged to her in love always. yet he would not say that, for only the yes need be spoken now — mahler, unfooted and wheeling through this dizzying, electric sky, and it seemed for a moment that the creeping granite smears inside him slipped back to reveal the greening after a burned forest.

Yes.

Wylla let go the breath that burned behind her breastbone. She was so ready for him to say no, as she had to him twice before on account of poor timing. This certainly counted, she thought. If Mahler was indeed on his deathbed, and if she could find no cure, then surely their binding was more cruel ... No. She would find a cure. Besides, there would be no other love in Wylla's life, regardless if he was her mate or not, so making it official was its own kind of closure.

She leaned into Mahler's affections with an ease not often present between them. Like Mahler, Wylla felt like love renewed, like the many barbs between them were lifted away, leaving only what had been present all along but wielded clumsily by the pair of them. She arched into his touch and rubbed the side of her face against his sturdy chest with a purling growl, willing away the knowledge that several months before it had been fuller.

Mind, body, soul — Wylla was all Mahler's for tonight. She placed heated nips along his collar, with a happy whisking of her tail and flash of something suggestive in her yellow eye. For now and always, she was his, of course, but for tonight without distraction. Tomorrow, her search would begin, and she prayed to all the loveless and leering gods of the world that somewhere out there was a healer who could help him, or a witch who could save him, even at her expense.