Wapun Meadow when i was a younger man, looking for a pot of gold

A smile of her own, hesitant and timid, arrived in answer to Indra’s verdict on her children’s names. But when quieried of the male, it faltered, and it was with a whetting of her lips that she adverted her gaze for endless heartbeats. Mate, my mate, minecame that covetous, simmering murmur from so long ago. — Oh, how she wished; how it alit each nerve, each ebb within her. He would always thrum within her blood.

“He has been with me, ever since I came to him of this, and accepted ze pups as his own. Not my... my mate,” a flicker in her slim jaw, eyes shying and elusive, pulse aching in her breast, ”but he has loved ze children ever since he felt them.” Just as he’d promised to raise them with her, Aure had vowed to let him come about in his own time. She’d  thought with their shared studies of their children, they might’ve been on the mend.

Regardless of her yearning for his mind, his heart, she understood Verx stayed out of ardor for their Drago, their Isi. She very much doubted he felt for her whatever Mahler believed. Especially in this dreary week, and why there’d ever been another rift between them to begin with. A rift of her own making.

If I look back... Aurëwen could only look ahead, now. She could wallow in her mistakes and despondency, or she could resume falling into the mother she’d meant to be. With a shiver, she mused, ”Even if he had left me, he did not. He chose to raise them alongside me without my asking. It... it is as much as I can ask for. For now.”