Hideaway Strath if you're soft on rebellion, it'll grow

posting this now because the rest of the week is crazy busy, but know that Olive speaks only after everyone else in the family does.

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When a call from Arturo pulled her family from their nest amongst the strait’s sanctuary, she knew not the reasons why. The sylph simply picked up a babe up in her mouth, nodded towards her the dark knight who held the other two in his own, and they moved onward towards the sound. Such was how they traveled nowadays — wordless, child laden, yet rife with love and understanding. 

Then, when Arturo pulled the family’s inner circle close and conducted a trial, she still knew not the reasons why. For the longest time it felt like a morbid joke, a farcical writ of habeas corpus, a threatening pretense that Arturo would soon break — but he never did — and as Olive sat with Dakarai, three mewling cubs nestled against their limbs, realization dawned on her. Her feathered ears swept down and back, pressing hotly against her skull. Her throat grew tighter and tighter, her tongue drier and drier, and within her chest she experienced an agonizing hurt. While the rest of her body discernibly resisting that was being fed to her, her moony gaze fell listlessly [blindly] at some point on the ground in front of her paws. The sylph could not bring herself to look into the eyes of those who believed she was their enemy; her family, who so eagerly bankrolled Arturo’s unending callousness. 

In turn, each the wolves she held closest defamed and maligned her and her family. Dakarai spoke, but was censured forthwith by Lotte — and Olive could see nothing of the Queen’s hurt in the blatant face of her own. The mother grit her teeth and bit her tongue and tasted the tang of blood [a taste she so hated] but the sting did nothing to take attention away from panic at hand. Did the horrors of winter know no end?!  The sylph thought it was over when those Blackfeather Fuckers expulsed the trespassers from their land; then she thought it was over when the lovers wounds had healed; again when Blackfeather Woods came and left; and finally once more when three innocents entered the world, born of her womb. Then it was promised that their ultimate salvation laid nestled in the hinterlands, and so Olive had been torn from her birthing bed to slog across the wilds for days on end — coaxed onwards by the promise of safety, utopia and the possibility of mended relationships.

but it was their utopia, not hers

and just when hope and safety had finally felt theirs, life dealt the star crossed lovers another crushing blow. After all members of the family stated their peace [each and every one of the heathens acting as if they wouldn’t have made the very. same. decision.], Olive could no longer bide time nor her tongue. “No,” she gasped weakly — unable to believe she was actually having to safeguard her own babes from Arturo, Lotte, Chusi and the wolf who was once known as Isley. It was a favor, they said — as if they were a mother and father so incapable of caring for her children that they would deign to strip her of them. “No!” she cried louder, her voice strangled as it escaped her throat. Her and Dakarai, they were not bad; the sylph refused to believe that, no matter how often the world [and her own conscious] told her it was so. It was they who were bad and she who was good, fighting alongside her dark night to spread peace across the land — only that the prophet and her message of heartsease had been stifled by the mirage of packhood; seduced by the security of dependency. 

But Olive did not bring peace to the land as she thought she would have; instead, she brought ruin to everyone she encountered... Late the mother would labor endlessly over the grisliness of this idea, but not now. Her children needed her to be present — to keep them from the hands of hypocrites who would oust a simple wife and simple husband for a choice they would make themselves. The shrouded tempest would not see them corrupted at the hands of her once family, now enemies. “You would pluck newborn babes straight from their mother’s breast?” Dakarai was right about it all, right about everything! Oh, why did the druid not listen to the man; and why did he love her so deeply that he left her to make such decisions, unchallenged and unchecked? Why hadn’t he forced her to flee, to abscond with their fetal children when they had the chance? Truthfully, Olive knew why: Dakarai’s love language was providing and protecting — so whatever Olive wanted, Dakarai spoiled her with. When she wanted travel, they traveled. When she wanted to feel her body quicken with his seed, he more than happily obliged. When she wanted to ignore Arturo's threads, he heeded. Even when Dakarai was not Dakarai and they reeled from the loss of his memory, still he followed her into the jaws of hell — and when Dakarai wanted them to flee Teaghlaigh’s darkness, but Olive protested and wished to stay… well, he gave her just that. But now Olive wanted something that Dakarai could not give her.

and she wanted it more than all of those things combined.

“You lie to assuage the guilt you all feel. You know this is wrong. There is no justice in… in this” the mother seethed. “They will be given no choice when they come of age, for you’ve made the decision for them. My whelps are to be indoctrinated into a culture jaded by their caretaker’s misunderstandings — made to believe we are… their enemies.” The piebald lovers were the farthest thing from the cubs enemy, they were their creators! Olive knew this to be true, even though these bystanders determined it was not so. Olive knew it, because whenever she looked upon her babes, the mother felt nothing but pure and divine light blossom within her heart.They were hers. She smelt them when they were born and knew it was so. The waif felt their nascent little bodies from within, knew the pains of delivering them into the world. They were her children and no one could strip her of this.

 If nuzzling against her first born had been the best feeling in the world, then this certainly was the worst. 

The betrayal stung harshly. A fair trial would not, could not, be found here! Their jury [the arbiters of her barren future] was comprised of a man with a god complex, a woman in the late stages of pregnancy, a girl having an identity crisis amongst others, Let Arturo play god if he so wish — but her family would not continue to live under his tyranny. Who was this mortal man to make the decisions of the stars? At this point, tears freely wept down her face, not for the loss to Teaghlaigh but for the loss of her sweet babies. Olive bent her nose down and luxuriated against the feel of her maw presses into Sirius’s small, quivering body. He was sick. He needed his mommy. “I— I can nurse still,” she begged, her small voice contrasted against the anger she felt moments before and looking at the wolf once called Isley. If there was limited borage, it made no sense to waste away their mother’s milk — and might give her more time to figure out a solution. “Please,” she continued, gaze incandescent with hot tears and shifted to Lotte… supplicating her, mother to mother. “Let me nurse them.” Then, the mother looked at Ceannasach.

“Arturo, please.”

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