Redhawk Caldera i loved you first

funeral for bronco @Amalia @Ponyboy @Boris @Glee @Frolic

assuming NPCs are present! no posting order! will prob do two rounds

in the end, teya chose the maples overlooking the caldera beneath which to bury bronco.
she no longer wanted to lead. she no longer wanted to be here. helping to carry her husband to his final resting place sickened her until she all but vomited into the foliage nearby.
he would be here forever now, as sentinel over brecheliant.
oh, she loved him; she loved him; she knelt even now in the richly turned soil and sobbed heartbroken cries into the loam itself, as if it would rouse bronco.
but he did not rise.
and her pain fractured the woman irreparably.
ibis. bridget. reyes. bronco — all gone.
wraen, ukelele, reyes, bronco — would not come back.
in time teya's weeping turned toward sorana, the one she had truly failed.
eyes swollen, at last she rocked back and knit arms around her midsection, and crooned helplessly a final time before she stood, debris falling from her pelt, and called the pack.
teya blackthorn was ready to be done with this place of loss, ready to ensconce herself a last year somewhere, anywhere, until her children grew and she could —
maia, then, close; teya clung to her. eljay as well, his eyes soft with grief. callahan loomed behind his parents, and she was stricken to think that all the children too would suffer.
teya waited for the others, the scent of good fertile earth filling her nostrils until it threatened to choke her, a funeral bouquet for a man who would never whisper his love to her again.

Amalia cursed herself a thousand ways to Sunday. She had been absent when a huge harm had come. And for what to get attacked by the same creature that finally took Bronco from his bride and children.

She slunk into the area head down. Sides scabbed would eventually scar, to starkly remind her that she had been foolish and almost failed her pack for what? A moment to breathe and travel, because she was so selfishly conaumed with the fact that everyone left her. Ahe barely made ties anymore. Foolish.

Dwin and Bronco had never had a close relationship, though he had maintained the presence of a good-natured uncle throughout her childhood and early youth. After her return to Brecheliant both had been busy with their lives, had never properly reconnected and their connection had remained friendly, but formal. 

However, Dwin's keen eye had not missed the level of mutual love and affection between him and Teya. Each had come from difficult places in their lives and found happiness in each other. They had vowed to say together "until death did them apart" and that promise had been fulfilled. The irony of fate and the cruelty of the Great Narrator. 

Dwin was too young yet to have any interest or desire in companionship, but she had always assumed that partners, love and kids simply happened to everyone and that eventually there would be a time, when she too would put her life aside in order to dedicate it to family. The same way many generations of she-wolves in her family tree had done. 

Yet this year had been transformative in many ways. She had first learned that she could not live happily without companioship. She had learned later that fulfilling her duty unselfishly as a useful pack member, while forgetting and ignoring her own needs, made her miserable. She had learned that she did not particularly like kids and that motherhood was not her calling. 

And now... watching Teya consumed by grief and despair, she wondered, if loving someone so much was really worth it. Because here was a woman, who had woven her entire identity around this man and the family they had built, and then it was taken away from her mercilessly, leaving her broken. All throughout the funeral her gaze was trained on Teya, reading and taking in every bit of that emotional turmoil, which was tearing her to pieces. 

Memorizing every single detail. 

Deciding firmly there and then. 

That she would never make the mistake of falling in love. 

Because the trade off was far worse. 

As naturally cheerful and exuberant a child as Glee was, she knew when to hold her tongue and sit still. Now was one of those times, as she watched Teya's grief and saw it mirrored on the faces of her parents and older packmates.

She had never been close to Bronco, but she had liked him well as she liked everyone. She didn't fully comprehend that he was gone, but she wouldn't ask now for help with understanding. For now, she stuck close to her brother's side, lying on the ground with her head in her paws and her eyes wide and watchful.

The air was thick with unhappy emotions and it made Frolic fidget uncomfortably. If not for her parents shooting her sharp glances every few moments, she probably would’ve tried to sneak away to do something else. It wasn’t that she was bored, exactly, just that all this negativity felt like it was dragging on her, pulling her down into a dark and terrible place Frolic did not want to go.

Grinding her teeth, the youth sat still beside her siblings and focused on the plot of dirt where they’d buried Uncle Bronco, like a seed (or a tooth…). Now he would grow into a tree. They could still come to this place and talk to him. He wouldn’t have a mouth to talk back, of course, but he wasn’t really gone. Frolic wished she could make the others understand that, so maybe they wouldn’t all be quite so bummed.

When she couldn’t bear it any longer, Frolic opened her mouth to tell them when she felt her father’s paw rest on her shoulder. She glanced up at him and he shook his head. @Eljay didn’t look mad, just very sad. Frolic clapped her mouth shut, hunched her shoulders and tuned out all the bad vibes, escaping by way of a daydream.

The boy fought with his emotions as he stared at the mound of earth that covered his father. Sadness brought tears to his eyes, but he felt ashamed to cry in front of so many others who held their tears back. He looked from one to the next, wishing they would simply dismiss themselves so that the family who truly grieved could have their time alone with the grave. 

When his eyes settled on his buckskin cousin, it soured. Her vacant expression told him enough. Something akin to blame crept into his mind, and festered there. 

He chose to remain with his littermates, with his mother, the ones who seemed to understand the most. He simmered, boiled, and wept.

no posting order!

they came, and teya felt herself crumbling. but she could not break in this moment, and instead channeled her grief into one small smile that encompassed each. the children were growing larger, and the promise of wintertime hunters and spring to come should have pleased teya, but did not.
ceridwen was given the weight of her returning look for a brief time, and then the raven took a long breath.
"bronco blackthorn was great father and wonderful husband. he loved all brecheliant as family. we lose — we lose a lot today."
she didn't want to do this without him.
she didn't want to go on another word.
they felt empty and useless, nonsense for a man who couldn't hear them and never would again. "have many memories of bronco. what i remember first is how he loved me."
a clutch in her breath; she looked through blurred eyes at his grave. others were motioned to speak, if they wished, before she forced herself strong for another moment and howled out a single, long note which reverberated off the caldera walls.

A funeral. For their father. For their leader, Bronco. Bronte sat with the others, shoulders sagging. She understood now, a little more, what death was, staring at the mound of dirt under the tree.

It was where Bronco now slept, never to rise again. She felt numb and wrought with so many emotions all at once. Clashing violently against one another. Desperate, pleading eyes looked to her mother. But she was powerless. Fighting her own battle to keep herself together. There was nothing any of them could do.

Muted, she could form no words in her mouth. Only try and fight back choking little sobs as the tears flowed fiercer, harder. She had saved the nest she had discovered earlier, set between her two small paws. The eggs gone, offered to her brothers as tokens. The final piece, would be for their dad, returned to it's place in this tree, at the end of the service.

Grief got harder every time it happened, and at the same time easier. Eljay found that it didn't hit as hard as the death of many of those around him. And yet, the grief of those around him all the harder. Perhaps it was that he saw himself mirrored in them; his old self, the grief he had gone through many times. The rawness of the pain, the inevitable tears, now replaced in himself by the weariness of time & grief and with a blunted edge to it. Perhaps it helped that it was not so sudden, this time. He had seen the decline.

He attended in silence, offering a shoulder or a nuzzle to those who needed it. His eyes betrayed the pain inside - rueful, sad, weary, supportive - but he did not speak of his old friend, himself, just was there for the others.