Totoka River baby, when I whisper, can you hear?

Backdated to April 24, 2018. @Stockholm ♥

Coelacanth’s oven is preheated and ready for pupcakes.

Thirty-six hours, six baths, and a countless number of seaside sprints later, she knew —

Stockholm was never coming home, and unless he did, she was going to die, and maybe that was only fair, because this was all her fault to begin with. She never should have left him, never should have left Moorhen, and the humans in their helicopters had picked up her Gampr and taken him away, and she deserved it — she deserved to lose him as she’d lost so many others, because she was a Very Bad Dog and unworthy of good things like Stockholm and Moorhen.

Despite Moorhen’s vehement disapproval and under cover of darkness, she left Grayday and Lavender in the seawolves’ capable paws and struck out for the mainland with something like desperation sketching her silhouette with a skittish sloppiness that defied her usual elegance. A whine stirred in her throat as she backpedaled wildly and threw herself in the direction of the island — Moorhen was already so upset with her; she couldn’t bear to make the same mistake and abandon the girl a second time — but the bloodfire had already blossomed into a spiced flush that permeated her flesh with an ambrosial, sweet heat. The itch beneath her skin was not an itch after all but an electric current that danced along every nerve. The need she felt could not be assuaged by exertion of energy or consumption of food or water or soothing soaks in Skybowl’s hibernal melt — it was a blinding, whirling imperative that whipped her on and begged a wanton disobedience.

She crossed the drawbridge to her citadel and sank the toes of both forepaws into the soft sand where the Totoka River met the sea, hind paws set firmly upon the land bridge so that she was still technically standing on the sandbar — still technically connected to the island.