Northstar Vale i miss you in the dawn & most of all, your fingerprints, everywhere (mtr.)

He would not tell. But, then—
The stormborn had, by her own study, allowed himself to fester into fever.  “No. No, Dragomir, he ... wished for a moment away from me.”  And she’d only meant to respect his wishes, well and truly; but by the hour they had discovered their son had been taken to some place unseelie...  “Ze fault lies with myself, once more.”   There was no self-pitying in what she said; and her chords only fragmented from then on.

“You have seen my children come into this world, and meant to take ze realm where I spilt ze blood of their birth between my teeth. Hate me.”  He had been there, and she thinks she had glimpsed the wavering of mauve within his veiled guise. She still thinks she had.  “You regarded my person with honor in ze hour where there had been none,”  chords strained, softened, as the ink of evendim gentles the limnal edges of stars,  “you loved my brood. You have raised them, and m-m—”  and her breath stuttered, rattling that too-fragile heart. But it was breaking for the third, perhaps fourth time; once more all of Aurëwen’s own accord.

This was not to say that the silver had no love remaining for her children, or that Vercingetorix did not love them at all; and yet, for one such as she who had given such supposedrapture for the wayward father of her children, only for that balefire to have been smothered with the soot of her own ruinous words ... perhaps this is what made the silver so unfit a mother.

“I should have stayed.”  Should have remained in the shadows of the basilisks’ spire, and given several fathers to her children in the absence of theirs; rather than shiver and vow to seek he who had gone from them.

She should be ashamed to even breathe in the same light as the varmint; knowing he would very well dagger into her thrumming vein for all she had wrought upon his realm, his lord. So Aurëwen cast her disgraceful argents from his presence, brow crescented with the weight of all her condemned infamy. “Hate me with all your soul. ... It should have been you. O!—”   Perhaps, had she given herself to one such as he before her, austere and invidious, she may not have roamed rampant with flame for all the moons to come. Perhaps, with a male such as he, she might have been the mother her children wished her to be; that their father had once lauded her to be.

But Aurëwen knew now she was undeserving of caresses; of a lover’s sough into her neck; of a babe’s kisses to her nose; even moreso than to nurture what she could not and she was never meant to be a mother. Dark lashes fell heavy upon shorn cheek, for no doubt would she have grown into a befitting guide for her brood upon her own, still: “You should have made me,”  feeling an ache in her breast for the stygian she knew not how to pray to. Made me a mother; made me stay.

And then, a warbling beg, bitten. Red lips wisped repentance, which would most surely seem repuslive:  “Mahler,”  to who she had no right in aching for as much as she did in this moment; not when she had desecrated so much of her own; not when she was so unforgivably maudlin, so even in this. Please, hate me so!—