Moonspear ᵐᵗᵐᵖʰ envinyatar (mtr.)

Marigold. Astarte. Brumous. Saint.

The stricken turns each name into a quieted breath, all as she holds the widower as parchment holds the daub of quilltip; a pale songnote in the cradle of the uncomposed musiker. In his telling, she only exists as another draft in the dreary and dreadful diary. And he might dismiss her, too—
—but he only conducts the anchoring of his brow to hers, and when Andraste blinks she finds the salt of him upon her own lashes. Heart thrumming, hitching; she leaves limestone, returns wholly to the heather of him upon the earth; presses closer, for she must return too with the thinnest of comfort as he unearths himself.

She must;
thoroughly, truly.
Might this be love? Savaging, however softened?

She has done all opposite to ever fathom she might be romanced, proper; both in her past living and now in the one wherein she lay within hammered arms. Better would it have been for the minstrel to keep to mountain; and better still would it have been for Mahler to be lain upon a loyal other; amongst the shards and spires with brethren who were not stranger.

But he was not;
he was here; hers to heal.
Hers and not hers.

Yet Andraste wills it to receede; the laments, the gnarled briars of a Dornenfelder he has yet to   ( may never get to! )   story upon her thin ears. The faces that come and those that have gone. The many paths tread and unventured; the charting across land that would never again exist, having been drawn and redrawn in blood over thorned centuries. She wills for his sorrows to ebb, all with kitten kisses to feather at his rested temple, his stained cheek; all in the shifting of her nearer to him. And as she entreats it all to away from him, what is left is them.

"All of that is behind us, before us, now."
Just them; here, now.
Endless; equal.
The gleam in starsoft sights is raw.

Another weak parting of shorn lips:  "I want us—"
but the profession simply flutes as  Aiw wahhh us; and protestation in the form of some soft pink yawn; nose snuggling into the gloomy nook of the anchored jaw; and her breath is a hitched, stumbling thing. Andraste longs to look upon his face   ( handsome, in an unconventional, shadowed way, she thinks )   but her eyes become dark crescents, moon-jaw aquiver.

It must be love—
had she ever been held so tenderly?
​( yes; once upon a night )
—for why else would slumber beckon for her so?
I hope I ... deserve it.

Too weakened to keep from the veiling of her lashes, heavy to the fractured stage of cheek. Much too melting wax; angularity gone unresiliant; unresisting into the ashen anvil.  "Mahler"  is an inscrutable plea and again she swans her porcelain throat along the rigidity of his ribs. Her gaze is petal-soft, though she seethed toward that cavern mouth as if they were instead daggers.

Nevermind her lamb's lethargy!—
Andraste dared for a lune-lupine to enter. Should they arrive she would rise; take flight and bite them; stormborn; to have and to hold and hoard the naked wealth that the musiker has proferred unto her.

All expressed by sleepily toothing at Mahler's hipbone;
the only harm she would ever bring.