Sunbeam Lair ❝i am exhausted, i am exhausted— pillar of white in a blackout of knives.

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Pulse fluttered a million beats a minute as the scene unfolded before her — the sound in her head, all so reminiscent, of a lone sparrow wings’ beating against the perilous grasp of an unforgiving mouth. Be still, her frenzied heart. How could a girl fight the battle both before her and inside; of tender, potent, mothering flesh versus the hide of such a primal, although tattered, he-beast; truly, of nature against nurture? Maybe it was the deep, petrified albeit rotted roots of previous familial bonds that struck her confused, where love was always met with sordid hate and the two words were all too much intertwined with each-other. This pale wraith before her, a stranger, but all too reminiscent of an older sister from many moons ago — a broken dove who inhaled anger and in return exchanged these feelings in the form of bairns of her own. This raped and wretched mother, always filled to the brim with rage and children. The dark baron, the shadow of every patriarch her sorry eyes had laid their sight on —

But that was then, and this is now, this is not the same, but it’s too familiar, I can’t tell the difference—!

And so this catastrophic mixture of blood-tinged, matted fur and budding motherhood before her was just too much to pull herself away from; too recognizable, her young brain suffering to pull itself from the depths of her disillusioned thoughts of a broken childhood, such an overwhelming sensation deja vu—

“Stop—!”

—and the word broke from her feeble throat, eerily practiced, before her fragmented mind could even fathom beginning to catch up. Her call into the material world was enough to sober her from the delirium she was heading into, and as swiftly as she’d slipped, the pale dove came about her senses once more — such mental whiplash! — and just in time, to see the now increasing mess she had just bumbled herself into. What now, you birdbrain? She stood, the image of a decrepit, trembling on all fours at the mouth of the lair, a stifled breath crawling from her thumping chest as panicked eyes flitted between the two combatants — What are you going to do now?!

A nimble step towards the darkness ensued, brow knit with a certain fervour as she spoke on behalf of the blanched fae, this stranger who never once asked for her assistance, but her need to heal and care for all too insistent to ignore: “She — she is with child, you mustn’t be so foolish to think one could cripple a mother without certain consequence—“

This was all the girl knew to be true, her sole reason for being here; the scent of a new matriarch had been too much of a curiosity for her not to follow.

Her voice was weak, laughable, against the previously fast-paced density of the atmosphere, all of her hopes wagered against the possibility that this brute could be tricked into a weakly-spun lie of the two femmes already knowing each other... one lonesome would never go up against the pack. Are you mad?! Oath's voice rung ever-present in her ears — and oh when she finds out! Of what she had just done, of the beings she may have just potentially challenged, oh the huntress was going to skin her alive and eat her entrails.

The dove let her words hang awkwardly in the air, a proposition to one, a firm statement to the other; all the while mahogany eyes continued to dart nervously between the plush green at her pawpads and the gaze of the mother.

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