Arrow Lake fall down a rabbit hole

What baleful gaze that had been cast to the medic before had now turned to desperation and a glint of something else—hopelessness, loneliness, regret. Whatever it was that clutched at her pale breast alongside her panic was unrecognizable to her, and as Mahler suggested a route to health, the pale dove parted for him, allowing him to slip from the den she had hidden away in with her tiny family for weeks now. 

She fussed over her boy in the Kapitan’s absence. Her mind fluttered with the outcomes any mother dreaded, and she ensured the well-being of the other two of her charge as they mewled toward her. When Mahler returned, the exotic dame slipped to his side, allowing him the space he needed to tend to the waning boy. 

Time was not considered. She fed her silver and gold babes before slipping quietly away for only a moment, quenching her thirst and berating herself for all her faults that would have brought this about—her anger, her inability to care for herself. Had she not fed enough? Had she not drank enough to keep her milk supply at its strongest?

These questions went unanswered, and as she once more returned to the gargoyle who tended to her son even more gently than perhaps their father, she felt her despair meet a surging breaking point. “Diaspora is no longer home,” she choked out, the whithering form of the pale dove slinking closer to the ground and enshrouding her two healthy remaining cubs with her warmth. Her ears slid back to her skull as her jewelry eyes sought his own lavender, beckoning him to tell her otherwise. To instill promise to her once more.