Jade Fern Grove klagelied

mahler felt a muscle jump along his jawline as wylla spoke. the temptation was great — for a harsh moment it felt as though the shadowpriest must give in.
she abandoned sagtannet, came the embittered whispering of a mind gone to instinctual seed. this close, despite how dearly he had craved her nearness, mahler was choked by the lack of himself in her aura, how reclaimed by the land she had become.
expanding beyond domesticity into something else. you left, the hateful voice pulsed again. ragged and irrational, it formed a stumbling block behind which the gargoyle found himself trapped.
​wylla limned in anguish and begging, he turning to a glacial slice. why would she ask him to uproot again, after all these weeks? why did she not hold his goals as important, accept how he had created stability from nothing?
annoyance butting bruised against the sound of their breath mingling, her voice muffled as mahler wrapped his body around her own snall frame. "taikon is no longer vith the pack," he assured, thinking that if he could reduce what had happened to the singular moment of failure, his own inability to act, wylla might understand there was a better hope in the bracken wood.
mahler could not leave. too many depended upon him now for leadership, and again gorge rising; she had abandoned him to it, then come back to draw him away.
aiming to shove the ugly, cloying concept into a lockbox, mahler traced along wylla's cheek, scarcely still believing she stood with him beneath the cool arc of winterlight.
heart racing as he hoped, beyond reality, that the verlorene liebe of his sole heart might understand, might at last know.