Ankyra Sound " Look at that deep well, look at that dark grave. "

The moment she left @Rosencrantz, Raleska felt her composure begin to unravel. She fled shakily through the fir-studded cliff, a yammering fury blotting out the last of her sensibilities. How could @Erzulie and @Rosalyn have told him? Just thinking about that forced a sob to tear from her throat.

She didn't go to her mothers (how could she? they'd castigated her with the foulest mark possible by sharing with Rosencrantz what Raleska felt was a secret that ought to have gone to their grave.) If @Regin and Valravn found out, Raleska felt their worlds would be taken from them. She could kill him -- she could fucking kill him.

Never had Raleska been so deposed by anger and hurt. She wondered if this was how Caiaphas had spent most of her life. Feeling on this side of wrong, Raleska could see how her mother had gone gibbering into dissolution -- it all seemed so easy when you perceived the entire world had done you wrong.

But her mothers and Rosencrantz had done wrong; she couldn't see past that, and it was that dark and choking thought that she carried all the way to Ankyra Sound.

Before Raleska knew it, she was wandering the familiar, moss-carpeted halls of the great forest in which she had grown up. The trails came to her easily, even with most of them being half-obscured by thick ribbons of hard snow. Down through the thinning trees, the throat of the grotto became visible.

Raleska surveyed the coast line with a sense of weariness. She was compelled for some reason to visit the gravesite of her true mother -- the one who had done everything wrong but had never once betrayed her. Not in that way. It hadn't hurt as much when Caiaphas had left, it hadn't hurt anywhere near as much as the betrayal she felt burning in her heart from her surrogate mothers. 

It was strange being in the grotto again. Raleska walked solemnly down the smooth throat of the tunnel in silence. The plink plink of water in some distant subterranean tunnel came to her ears, as well as the low groans of captured wind which roamed the dark halls of the grotto in eternal entrapment. Occasionally she heard the soft sigh of the sea above, or the low growl of earth as it moved in its slumber.

She came upon the cavern where the pool in the center gurgled. Splashing the surface, Raleska looked up to the ceiling where the many serrated teeth of stalactites grimaced, briefly illuminated by rippling phosphorescent blue.

Her mother's grave was not so far from here. The earth still looked disturbed where she and @Ephraim had interred their mother. Seeing the gravesite caused Raleska's fur to stand on end and a chill to ripple down her spine. It was hard to believe this had been nearly a year ago -- the cave had a strange way of preserving things to the point she could have sworn Caiaphas had only been buried yesterday.

Sitting by her mother's grave, Raleska closed her eyes. She tried to think of what Caiaphas would do, what she would feel. She tried to pull in from that emptiness some sense of purpose, some reasoning that could justify why either of her surrogate dams had felt it wise to tell Rosencrantz anything. For all they knew, he'd flounce off to some other pack tomorrow -- how was he worth entrusting the most important secret Raleska had ever bestowed upon them?

She bit her lip. I'd kill them all, came the cackling voice of her mother. Was it the wind, was it her exhausted mind? Raleska's eyes opened in a flurry, greeted with nothing but the grim features of the cave in which she'd been born and the cave in which her mother had died.

Along the wind, a scent that brought a shiver down Raleska's spine. KILL IT KILL IT, shrieked her decaying mother. Not the scent of brine, not the scent of decomposition. The scent faded and Raleska closed her eyes once more. She was imagining it. She was feverish, she was out of sorts -- all sorts of fanciful things came to one who was hysterical. She just needed to sit here for a while, regain her composure and think. Eventually, she would know what to do.

While she sat in silence, Raleska felt something uncanny slip into her conscience. The plip-plip-plop of water still churned its ceaseless wheel, but there was something else. Her ears strained between the sundry noises of the cave; something soft and muffled, a quiet pit-pit-pit of stealthy but heavy feet.

Raleska's hackles fully flared as the realization came to her. It wasn't her mother's ghost she was feeling in this cave -- it wasn't the groan of the sea she'd heard. Behind the plinth in which her mother's body had been interred, Raleska's eyes opened as a shadow fell across the mouth of the chamber's entryway.

She rose with a throaty laugh as the shadow advanced, her lips contorting into a toothsome challenge. "Bring it, you bitch."