Firefly Glen vive, vivio, vivira

Adapt. “I tend to usually be such.”
It’s what she’d told heda’s son and cheka, when she’d first arrived to the red hinters of Drageda with a coyote chomping at her desperate kill. “I favor to think that I still am.” And then they’d left, herself almost due for delivery, with heda dashed into the sea, her cheka’s flame guttered out, and the rest of the kru gone with the wind. “...Adaptable, I mean.” It’s what she’d told the kapitën when they’d first met — and then, she’d left, too, with the children she’d brought and birthed there, daring the wilds.

And now look where she’d put them all.
...But, perhaps one final time, she could put whoever remained of her family somewhere that they deserved. So Aure opened her maw, and let a tentative wish breathe out: 

“I would like to found... a pack, my own, someday.” Not now, though, and not in the next moon. They needed to heal, all of them, and learn what they could while there was still time to. But Aure could no longer keep this idea to herself: “I have not envisioned all, yet, but I wish it to be a place of learning, of preparation. For everyone, yes, but significantly for ze young. A... a defensive claim ruled by reason, first, in ze way I have not yet seen in my time here.” A lull, then: “I want to found a fortress. For my children, and for families who need one, too.”

It was the only thing that made sense to the silver, anymore; made sense in the way that Mahler had once advised her to be a pillar in this son’s life just as Hydra now did, if only for living’s sake. ...But just as her dragon’s visceral wounds mend and his bones realign, so must his mind, and his mother’s too. Isilmë’s, and...
The inked wyvern who rose before her like the hateful shadows between stars the greenseer’d once followed — there was a sense of understanding from Aure that she meant to invigorate the sorrowful mother. And said vigor was there, yet lurked far and muffled beneath a settlement of obsidian melancholia.

“Your words reach me,” Aurëwen assured, but her tongue and lashes were weighed by  (to be blunt)  depression. “I only...” Well, she did not know when it would lift from her, this time. If ever. “I am not sure that I deserve to dream such dreams.”

But to make it a reality, she would have to use the months of autumn to mend her own mind, first, and then perhaps she would tell those she loved of her want. For now, though, she fell silent once more, mulling over all she’d admitted — to a stranger, no less. Queen or no.