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

a tremble dragged at the musiker's jaw, more visible than he would have liked. the water in which he stood had become cloying, but he did not haul his bulk from it, not yet, for his eyes were trained intently upon aurëwen and the plaintive coo of her accented voice.
another time, mahler would have forgiven her everything, seen in her restlessness a broken and unfufilled heart, and sought to mend it. but she had become a mother who had never put aside her wanderlust, and in many instances, had placed her own desires above the needs of her children. the little stars would have thrived upon the rich dark loam of diaspora; he would have given her as many scouting missions as she needed to satisfy the deep and untouched well in her heart.
i should have stayed, and here the gargoyle dipped his scarred muzzle with a weariness that ran marrowdeep and bitter. it was beyond her son and her daughter, beyond aurëwen herself; it was the feeling of loss. repeated again and again and again, and this time it had rankled its way into the new general's soul-chords and lodged itself there with a possessive gall.
oh, cursed creature he was! mahler did not immediately recognize the sorrowful intent of aurëwen's changed voice, head lifting in surprise as she spoke of her longing for he himself in a role he could not now play. and now the throated pacing of her tones, the smoke at its edges stealing wisplike across his defenses. 
mahler was threadbare; he inched toward aurëwen and left answering ripples in the glinting surface through which he sliced with a surfeit of something indescribable mounting in his chest. it was not the softness he had felt for ruenna, the satisfaction he experienced with takiyok, the intrigue that ketzia inspired in him. it was altogether different, driven by a mixture of scorn and pity and desperation.
"is that vhat you vant?" he growled when he had come to stand upon the stone plinth, dripping water down upon her feathered body.  that he should make her, that he should engender some satiation, some end to the endless loon-cry of her wayward spirit, tether it to her body with his own. lavender eyes burned toward her own sole orb, roving the scars new and old that had rent her face, and he was silent.