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

Much like their last solemn discussion  (moons ago),  Aurëwen expected for the basilisk’s apostle to turn from her in favor for that mountain lake where he came. She didn’t comprehend that he’d gather her up and to his ashen, scarred breast; that he’d cradle her there with  a patience more suited for eternities.
Then, like a heavy-tongued, dumb chant, her words came:

“Broken ribs and legs;
torn neck and claws;
a fractured cheek.
He fell from Silvertip.”
Yes, fell—for how else could those injuries have come to him? Her mind wasn’t as open to the imaginative scenarios as it’d once been, and so Aurëwen refused it to entertain otherwise.
For now... until her son spoke himself. If he spoke.

With a torn cheek and thin neck fitted into the column of the Kapitën’s, Aure let herself linger in that stone-warmth for as long as she dared; a place where, she was certain, few and fewer have been invited to. 
And, after listening to his heartbeat and considering her own consideration, well... she may as well tell one of the waning few she trusts, anymore, with all that’s happened. So she began with Dennan.

Letting her dove-boned figure situate itself further into the stolid rigidness of the musiker, she murmured to him of the Dreadful and what he’d done to her—as a whelp, as who she has become—and of their horrid encounters both recent and in the misted past.
Then, she told him more presently of the three’s reuniting with Vercingetorix: how the four of them had rejoined  (and subsequently left)  in the midst of chaos on the coast. Her recollection led her to speak of Dragomir’s capture, the state they’d found him in, and now... here. 

“What have we done?” came the fearful, hushed whisper, eyes shut at his throat. “He cries out in ze dark, lies abed, adrift, broken, and... we...” We don’t deserve our children.