Arrow Lake Will you be my breath through the deep, deep water

four children!

stigmata raced along a paw-beaten trail, blindly running on the midwife's errand, while mahler's words of good news filled him with a potent energy as he went.

they live!

he was quite unskilled in the delicacies of caretaking, but pride had him overlooking his own ineptitude in the matter. he couldn't think of much else than four living pups, and his excitement drove away what insecurities might have had the general fumbling about his task. he gathered (and damaged) as much moss as he could carry and let them soak in the shallows of a stream.

and so does she.

emotion welled up inside his chest and expelled from him in a sudden burst of billowing howls - singing his praises towards takiyok's feat, and announcing to diaspora that new life had been born unto their stead. as his cries died away, he quickly gathered the water-laden moss and returned to the new mother's densite in a pace likened to godspeed.

though neither takiyok nor mahler had understood his unwillingness to enter the birthing den, he might later be able to explain that it was simply a matter of how he had been raised: that mothers of the legion allowed no wolf within their birthing den, and it could be weeks before even the father would be permitted to see his children. even then, fathers weren't largely involved in the upbringing of their own children, and up to this point stigmata had always considered himself more of a prized breeder than an actual father...

only time would tell if that would change; but for now he delivered what was asked of him, and returned to his post at the lip of takiyok's whelping den as if automated to that position. almost exclusively, he looked at her - the exhausted child-bearer - his furrowed expression brimming with intense worry and fascination as his kill-brother tended to her with a diligence he felt incapable of. all the while his ears strained forward to hear the muffled squeaks and squirms of the four large whelps at her belly.

the sound of good omens, and better things to come.