Northstar Vale oh, really? you usually just let strangers rub chamomile onto your lovely bottom?

( ‾ʖ̫‾)

Though she had reached for him, and though her ruined lips found the woad filaments 'round each laceration, melitse's reciprication was such an inconceivable, unforeseeable thing that the breaths fluting gentle from waxen throat returned to her lungs, sharp, soft; left her likewise stuttering, shuddering. Clockworks all had squeaked to a halt. The trappings and riggings made rust. A mischievous, macabre humor in the form of a delayed, deep blush of spilt wax that crept through the vessel of her. Her hummingbird-frail jaw fluttered, could not glut the honey of this moment and return those nectarous words; useless.

Andraste had been returned to the age of creature, where all she had known was the preytaste on her tongue and air snorted hot through flared nostrils, not a word strung from wildwood chords lest they be wolven bruffs. Thoughtless, insatiable, territorial. But by some spell or scheme, his echoing elicits an unprecedented:

“Oh.”

That was all it took to have everything expedite itself. The clockworks churned; the gears whirled away. She thinks steam went a-whistle from her ears. She fears she might faint. It was too much for her to conduct: the balefire of his– his love—  (his!) and the chugging of her heart's blood within her weakened breast. The wax spreads, stains the parchment of her; dribbles over the unyeilding oakwood of him. Too much to be felt within a figure so thumbelline. The boy with robinfeather had been right all along; four children sit on her enervated minute hand. The fée twitched; fairydust clung to starstruck wings.

A funny laugh; a bleat; a mewl. Thin and trembly little unwolven noises, all plucked from the broken lute crooked between throat and lungs. Stares dumbbell and rasperberry-red at him and can find not a thing more to tell. Until—  “Oh!”

So terribly tremulous and aquiver that she could not tuck her face away betwixt her paws in a pathetic attempt of self-preservation. But ... they clasp about her snout all the same and skewer her bashful features from his sights. She cannot dare to touch him, now; she would implode, she would burst at the seams of her now-garbled wits and be rendered entirely a dolt that delighted only in her darling's attentions. A dimwit, godless girl who sustained herself on the gospel of his voice.

Andraste is diminished to the edge of her own delicacy and feathers out in unfettered rapture upon their stonebed; ever-shying.