Nova Peak If you must mourn, my love, mourn with the moon and the stars up above

wylla: pspspspsps

while the battleship-grey mother hunted for her daughter, she became the prey to the thing she sought.
phaedra blinked as the spindle-shanked matriarch hiked past her without even a glance, meandering rather in her contemplations (or so it seemed to her)—maybe it was just the flowers clogging her sinuses, but she seemed to have misplaced her sharp sense of smell from carrying the perfumed blossoms. whatever the reason, wylla's milkglass daughter watched her pass with an impish smile on her face, motioning to caintigern with a pitch of her head to go elsewhere. 
the huddled foxweasel didn't need to be told twice. he bound away into the cover of some grassy frith near a shady recess of trees, just in case he needed the more protected crannies of the branches above. 
phaedra twisted her lips in deep thought—was she still avoiding her mother because she was so faint-hearted that she could not cope with one vase-shattered-on-the-wall argument? she did not want to be. she'd stopped sleepwetting before they'd departed the sunspires, and though the bad dreams recurred, she did not speak of them or suffer night terrors. instead, she had swallowed a key to the door of a secret world that she would never share with any other. 
except caintigern, of course. who would believe a weasel? he was her best friend, besides.
either way, she couldn't avoid them forever, but phaedra's recent unavailability was more circumstantial of her parent's preoccupation with staking their claim here; they didn't have eyes on the backs of their heads, which gave her, for the most part, carte blanche of the place.
their new homestead seemed to do all of them a bit of good. open spaces could be coursed without fear of spearing oneself on the cuspidal, vermil crown of the sunspire's grand summit—endeared as it had been to most that had lived there.
the peak here provisioned them all with an expansive repertoire of terrain to explore. even phaedra had mellowed out in the time since. she enjoyed roaming the swaths of flowers, acres of rainbow freckles to gild the green. the buttercup petals felt like especially soft velvet against her face, and made the sky strikingly blue.
it made her think of her before-home and the secret garden there, hidden like treasure amidst thick forestry near the cave her mother had birthed and raised them in. the peach tree, and the fairy ring, and the terrible backwater that dwelled behind her lids.
just as much, it made her think of thade. he never cared for flowers as far as she knew, but she thought of him often nonetheless; thought enough for everyone who managed to forge ahead despite the missing puzzle piece that completed their small family. no matter how many times she looked under the couch, the piece was never there. still, she looked. just in case. everytime she thought to, she looked.
presently she was edging the marked paths, whisper-footing through the briery newgrowths when her mother passed by. she stood still, and once she was sure caintigern was unget-at-able, lashed the tip of her plume with brattish intent. her gemgaze remarked the fireweed bouquet cradled in her mother's mouth; did wylla know those were a mild laxative this late into summer? phaedra knew that from personal experience. 
muddy and wet from the rain, phaedra pogoed out of the bushes and demonstrated the most terrible shriek of a boogeyman she could muster from her lungs at her mother's behind.
how 'bout them apples? she smiled, sweetly hitching one foreleg over the other.