Hushed Willows these are the days of our lives

Here we go!! Please allow @Khali and @Olive to post first. Any others are welcome after that; however, if you do hop in, please keep in mind that I intend to keep this a quickly moving thread. If you hold it up for longer than 24 hours or so, I'm probably going to skip you. No offense intended--just wanna get these kids borned! <3

Forward-dated to tomorrow.

Lily didn't have the benefit of a calendar to let her know when the pups were meant to come. But it felt too long--like some invisible date had came and went, and now she hung in limbo. She paced restlessly near her whelping den for days, eating whatever was brought to her, barely sleeping. Was this how it was all the time? She didn't remember her mother having such trouble.

It was a pleasant, partly-cloudy early afternoon, and Lily started to feel a gurgling in her stomach again. She had been having problems with indigestion; the breakfast this morning seemed no exception. With a groan, she rose to her paws, trying to ignore the cramps. The poop would come, she knew. She just had to walk it out.

Except this particular poop was a painful one, and the blackbird ended up panting and groaning near the brush by the den, eyes and teeth clenched shut against the pain. Ripple after ripple of agony surged through her body, until--ah, sweet relief. Lily turned to examine what hellish feces had wrought such calamity upon her insides, and froze, her face going blank with astonishment.

A whitish-clear sac of flesh, smeared with blood, was on the ground where she had been sitting. With a small cry, Lily surged toward it, tearing the sac with gentle but insistent teeth and revealing a perfect little dark pup. A perfect little not breathing dark pup. Beginning to panic, she licked it, whining, trying to stimulate something. She knew well that not all pups survived, but she hadn't expected. . .

Oh, please, wake up, she begged, tears beginning to stream down her face. Please, please, wake up. But after a few minutes more of attempting to rouse the babe, it still did not move, and Lily sat back with a moan in her throat, grieving. It was not long after that before she felt more cramps--which she now recognized as contractions--ripple through her, these more painful than the previous.

Lily managed a strangled cry for her mate and for Olive, a seasoned midwife, before the agony nearly knocked her flat. She crawled into the whelping den, torchlight eyes fixed, haunted, on the corpse of a child that would never see the light of day. Wave after wave of excruciating cramps, and then. . .

Another pup, paler this time. Again, she ripped the sac, and it did not breathe, did not cry out. The process was repeated, the same results were yielded.

"Your babes will die." She remembered, suddenly, the voice of that grotesque hunchbacked young man. Something had been off about him from the start, and now Lily knew he had put some sort of curse on her. She half-sat up, beginning to panic. Was she about to lose her entire first litter of children?

OLIVE!!! Lily shrieked, her voice ripping through the willows. KHALI!!