Stavanger Bay caught between heart and hemorrhage

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Though his days are filled to the brim with various responsibilities — preparing for the coming winter, maintaining relationships with the neighboring packs, and helping Doe raise their youngest children — Szymon’s attention strays often to his first daughter. Now that Julep and Isengrim are just shy of five weeks old, able to see and hear and wander, his job feels both easier and more difficult. The Drop is drawing near, for their stubby limbs are gaining strength; but today, Szymon pushes all his worries to the back of his mind as he seeks out his gray-eyed stargazer.

His first instinct is the right one — though he doesn’t know the magnitude of hurt that has befallen the daughter of his heart, he knows that the birth of her tiny siblings has made her question things and feel emotions he’s helpless to understand or commiserate with. What should he say? He has learned enough to empathize with the girl — she looks different from the Four, and she lacks the Cairn lineage and Hind’s legacy; it must feel different, but he can’t imagine how. It’s a situation that he doesn’t know how to navigate, and in a very Szymon-like way, he chooses not to explore it at all. His personal truth is that Qilaq is special in a unique way that his children by birth cannot compete with; it is simply different. Doe chose Qilaq, and Szymon would have put his own flesh and blood between her then-tiny body and Damien’s imposing force to keep her.

Qilaq is as much Szymon’s flesh and blood as the Four are, just in a separate way.

He lingers for a moment in the den mouth, pausing to mark the outside walls with rubbings of his fur and deep furrows of his talons. He is possessive of the place despite its disuse, and freshens the scent markings before he goes to his girl. A shell rests between her paws, and her tapered muzzle is draped over it and pressed into the sand in a way that appears almost forlorn. Szymon, still worried about the girl after her own Drop, steps warily into the den and curls his body around Qilaq’s. It doesn’t occur to him to let her sleep; he bends his head and begins to groom the fur at her nape and shoulder, incisors nibbling away knots and snarls as his tongue sweeps her dark fur and leaves it glossy and shining.

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