Ravensblood Forest father of the year

last last post, just tagging the daddio for ref

The touch of her former guide was what aided Aure into moving into action; in the terse lulls that followed and filled the deafening silence ever further, the silver mother moved from Sanguinus’ side to instead whisper past her beloved’s flank, pinked nostrils flaring in tentative, half-hazy focus. “He would not leave without a word to us,” she murmured, more to herself than anything — and then she drew from @Vercingetorix’s side and into the dark copse beyond...

...and no sooner had her breaths came ragged, raw, as she stared into the blasphemous dark, petrified in thought, body— “They took him,” she croaked, and trembled ever harder.

The scents might be fraying, and her tenacity for tracking, for inspection might be lacking; but the signs were there, in the scuffling near the fated stump, and the remnants of an odd misstep towards the riverway.

Embers she’d once been kissed with now piqued from their slumber into something raw, ferocious, indifferently ruthless... but, no. She must smother it, all of it, for when she looked into the eyes of her son’s snatchers  (or, so she hoped, so she thought). With ruff shivering into a cascading mess of frenetic nerves, the herbalist could only look toward the water with an uncharicaristically hateful study.

What did the water take from me?
Her breath came faster, at that; at the prospect of one of their brood perhaps facing the same damnable fate that she’d fallen to, not a month shy of three moons herself. And then, there was the worse; it could always be worse, always, always;

“No,” she grit out, but it was a choked, desperate, hushed. And then strained, thinner than a whimper, “No,” as wrathful veils of salt drew themselves over her argent gaze. Breath rattled weak in the clutches of springy ribs, claws scored into the loam with a deep knead, and she was shivering, quaking, unseeing—