Sleepy Fox Hollow Folk star

mahler thought that wylla had just provided him with the most valuable insight into the emotional world he had never quite been able to conquer.
stunned, he was stonelike for a long heartspan of moments, breathing gently in between the moments she granted him. imageries of a world with wylla spun silken in his mind from the tendril of his returned love, and he began to see it as a sproutling, in need of a soft care only the pair of them could grant.
"vylla," mahler began, and, then his voice contorted with a manful sob, which he cut away in favor of a stoic stare out across the snow. a spate of rapid blinking as jawline tightened and throat rumbled with a deep, sudden hoarseness.
but when he turned back to her, the lavender had gone ashimmer with a foreign, rare wetness. "gottverdamt," the gargoyle chuckled dizzily. "i did not think you vould ever ..."
a squaring of broad shoulders; mahler composed himself fully now. "i have been ... confusing, i know now," he started anew, cautious energy in his lilac gaze. "i have told you vone thing and done another. i —"
how unheard of, these lapses in his ability!
"— prized routine over love. promise over any feelings. i made arrangements before you returned, and then vhen ... ach!" he turned his eyes once more to the pale expanse, frustrated with himself.
"only vone time before did i ever love another, and vhat i feel for you is more full and realized than i knew at that time," he sighed. marigold, the greatest and most beautiful guilt he would ever experience.
"i did not connect feeling to vhat i do vith my body. i could not understand why you did." lips parting; the watercolor purple of his eyes shifting back to her open features, the vulnerability of all she had said.
"it is svift, yes, moreso than yours. but it has never faltered. even if you had never come back, it vould have not left me. it has not this long time yet." gaze moved to her body again; mahler could not help himself, compromised as he was. "but now? vylla, i —" the gargoyle's eyes searched her face, "i fault myself for not vaiting longer for you. i vould have vaited forever had i known there vas but an inkling you might return."