Jade Fern Grove klagelied

her pleading reduced him to shale; it turned him inside and out, wound his gut into a wizened state, brought anger and pain and ich möchte mit dir kommen leaping to his tongue. mahler crushed it against the edge of a canine as he turned his head sharply away from her pleading; lilac ripping from the honeygold that their phaedra had inherited. 
and pride, oh, that horrid lurking devil. wylla had nothing, sundered to ash beneath the continual lashing of mahler's arrogance. and though he did not see it as such, and perhaps would never evolve beyond his manly constraints, pride rose again. it choked him, spread through him like gall that wylla would suggest he should leave his post and the wolves who had given him their loyalty, and go to live as a subordinate in another locale.
and though some tragically logical part of him was aware that his focus should be upon her pain, it drove him apart from wylla another spare inch. mahler, faltering to seize back that space with a breath and his gaze returned to the beseeching grasp of the only one who had ever laid him so bare. a breath drawn from some secondary place and his ego ebbing into shame again.
and though the gargoyle wanted to twist his shoulders against the truth of it, his tongue was held. he had set her beside him and not wintersbane; she led alongside the more united front he and the northerner had presented.
vulnerability in the sunlit tears tracing upon her face. far beyond her shoulder the daub of shadows marking the sunspire he had once ruled with stigmata. hardness limning his muzzle as he considered that all things somehow came back to the death of the ironstar. mahler had never respected another ruler after that. and so her position, compromised.
the malice of his subconscious revealed swiftly sickened mahler. lips thinning into a dour line. how had he convinced such a wild, proud woman to give up the sum of herself for what amounted, ultimately, to nothing? he was stricken by himself; he saw the hopelessness and the anguish tangled in a black ectasy upon her face, and knowing he
— had destroyed wylla;
rot turned lichen across the inward span of his tissues. 
the pride now, dissolving into self-loathing;
and the things left unmentioned in her well-painted diagram of how he and she might move forward into the world;
"elke. ciri. astraeus." his lavender eyes searched her own. "do my other children have a place in this kingdom, vylla? or do you vant to create a bubble around the two of us that at last ignores the mistake you felt i made?" dustbowl tonguetip and dread turning his blood to icewater;
for that was the sum of it;
his love, compromised. her position, compromised. his fealty to their children, compromised. wylla wished him to put down rivenwood where the pair of them stood silhouetted by morninglight, in the fel-green grove, and with it everything else. 
the pack upon the mountain — what did this place hold for her if he did not come?
"i vould never expect you to stay vhere you felt so miserable, vylla." deshalb bin ich dir nicht gefolgt.
"and i do not need you to make amends," voice fracturing,
you matter most to me
the cry for him to answer in kind;
"you have a dream of me i do not know how to match."