Wheeling Gull Isle four in the morning

Paging @Moorhen, when life gets less crazy. ♥

By the time the Gampr made his way to his Groenendael’s side, she was as low as a dog could be, draped over the thinnest part of the Skybowl’s verdant ring with her tail blurring like cuttlefish ink in the water and her muzzle on a faint downward slope from the frail slump of her shoulders. Only her eyes moved when he approached, luminous with a limitless wellspring of tears, saline tangling in her lashes to be listlessly blinked away. The caldera’s mirrorlike surface stirred as her tail flicked once or twice — she was happy to see him, even if she lacked the wherewithal to convey it! — and then her gaze drifted away, pinning itself on where she’d last seen her twin.

A hiccupping sigh tripped from her trembling lips as Stockholm bolstered her with his comforting warmth, the treasured heaviness of his great head a grounding weight across her shoulders. His nearness anchored her, and she could not lose herself wholly to her grief — and for Seelie, in this moment, that was good. She had Stockholm, and he had promised her that this would always be the case. Still, it was a long moment before she moved at all, tearing her attention away from the horizon line to settle on the plush fur of her mate’s broad chest. A tearful whuffle saw her finely tapered snout burying with vehement need into the crook of his throat, and then she put her own needs aside. In case Moorhen had witnessed any of the commotion, Seelie wanted to offer comfort and reassurance — and, more selfishly, to glean added comfort from her lamb.

“M-Moorhen,” she whispered to her mate in a hitching, snuffling whisper-whine, beseeching him with kisses and nosing pointedly at his shoulder. Together, they rose sluggishly to their paws and followed a series of cascades down Skybowl’s slope to the western part of the island where they usually slept, Moorhen along with them. Though she could not call out for the banded female, the sheepdog was in full search mode, her graceful muzzle alternating between hovering over the ground and tasting the air for the Cairn girl’s scent. Now and again, she whuffed or boofed, though she didn’t yet have a call for the mahogany-eyed lamb the way she did Stockholm.