Hideaway Strath ceathairéad

I was going to make this a Mallaidh only post but I decided to include the twins so that Tori gets to start playing Roarke. ♥
Warning: Impossible biology ahoy!
Can has healz for Eirlys, please, Sonia?

Overwhelmed by grief and gratitude, Lotte lay her muzzle across one fire-kissed paw and crooned her affection for the viridian-eyed Leifteanant. The sentence Lotte herself had decreed weighed heavily upon her mind as she stared without blinking or moving at the tiny puppies who would never know of their mother’s love. “I spoke in anger and in fear,” she confided so softly that not even a wolf lingering just outside the den could hear, “but I do not want to kill Olive’s children.” Her breath hitched unevenly as she stretched forward and touched her nose to the small, pale blur. “Where I come from, white cubs are carefully watched — I was a white cub. There is a trait in my family; often but not always, white cubs change color as they age. It is useful for subterfuge.” She smiled, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.

“This one would have looked like his father,” she mentioned, pressing the wet of her nose to her firstborn’s crown. “That brown — I have none of it. His nose — ” her voice broke, but she kept talking anyway “ — it is different, you see? Sharper than hers. He would have been sleek like his isä.”

Pitching her voice to carry now, Lotte teased, “Perhaps our Ceannasach chose a wife like me to keep him warm in winter — or to accentuate his svelte silhouette by comparison.” The mild quip was designed to bolster @Arturo, Hemlock, and @Chusi’s collective mood as much as her own, but before she could follow up with a self-deprecating joke, her lips pulled back in a fierce grimace as a violent tempest of a contraction sent her rocketing abruptly to her paws. Whining softly, Lotte pushed through the pain as her body bade her, and a third cub slipped from her onto the den’s earthen floor. This time when she nipped through the membrane she was punched square in the nose by one tiny, flailing paw. So shocked was she by the living, breathing, punching puppy that she rocked back in startlement. “She is alive,” she said, utterly dazed, her tongue sweeping over the wriggling, mewling blur that would one day be known as @Mallaidh. “She is angry!” She nosed her daughter gently to her flank and craned her neck to observe.

Aries, Cassiopeia, and Sirius would live.

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Lotte spent the better part of an hour in a kaleidoscopic haze of anticipation and euphoria — but when nothing seemed to really happen for that hour, she found herself wondering whether her dream of a large litter would come to fruition or whether all of her efforts would be poured into just one tiny, shadow-wrapped princess. She could no longer put off the inevitable, though, and she tipped back her head to howl a single announcements to whichever members of her Family were in earshot: “All is well.” It was shortly after this cry went up that she experienced the worst pain she had ever experienced, surpassing even the burns she’d sustained during the Donnelaith fires. Breathing raggedly, she emitted a deep groan that crescendoed into a high pitched whine. “No, no,” she begged senselessly, a river of Common and Tundran spilling from her panting mouth. Following the will of her body, Lotte strained for a good half hour before finally — finally! — a much larger sac slipped from her. Sobbing for breath, she just barely managed to gently scoop the bundle near to her and nip through the membrane — but what she saw astounded her.

Two heads, not one, poked out of the sac. Dumbstruck, she cleaned both tiny faces — they were smaller than their sister and snowy white. One of the cubs — @Roarke the Spleenbane — immediately began attempting to nurse, latching onto his mother’s lip like a tiny little sucker fish before she cleaned him off and nosed him alongside his sister at her side. The other, though, appeared to be deceased. Lotte licked at the female twin insistently, but the new mother was so flustered from the shock and the pain that she missed the flicker of movement as she nosed the little girl toward Hemlock for aid.