Whitewater Gorge i wish i could rub the grief from you as if it were a smudge on the cheek

She might have thawed for Mahler, if he hadn’t made an enquiry that halted her frigid step; thawed for him in the way she hadn’t known how to the moment she’d heard her love’s roar and seen their son’s—
“In Kaisteloki,” came the wintry rasp of her answer, “with their father. With my comrades.” The silver couldn’t help but balk, oh-so faintly it might’ve gone unnoticed, at the words that she knew may pain the musiker in one way or another; but it was gone from her in the same breath that she continued to circle, incrementally advance.

The ash-fallen Aure hesitantly made for had nursed numerous hurts during her stay in his brother’s claim; from sniveling over Dragomir’s bout with dirt, to his father’s twice-over departure, and then, ultimately, to tending to what that blasphemy had made her into today.
She doesn’t know if that unassuming gentleness would ever return to her. She doesn’t know if... how others might take to her, anymore.

Aurëwen doesn’t know what she is — not a mother, as it’d undoubtedly been her own actions that’d led to Dragomir’s current state. Her fault. My fault. 
“For what it is worth,” she breathed, words ragged, faint, “perhaps I should have stayed. Stayed, and let ze General churn my childrens’ minds. Perhaps that is a kinder fate to my son, on his deathbed.”
“I...” A shivery gulp. “I have come to terms with my faults of that day. My foolishness. All of those, and before, and... there is nothing more I can do.”

Quivering incomprehensibly, Aure blindly shivered her way down down down; coming to an entire rest before the cheerless gargoyle, too weakened, too spent of tears to have the decorum she had only moments ago. What more can I do?