Wheeling Gull Isle [M] i lie awake and try to recall how your body felt beside me

The weight of their losses would always be there. Haunted by the smell of smoke on a clear night or by the screams of lost children in the dark, knowing that everything they touched turned black with ruin — everything except one-another.

Did they dare try to bring more life in to the universe? Had the gods not already scorned them for their attempts, scattered each family they tried to build? Mou slunk closer; he listened, knowing of this fear, carrying it with himself in equal measure. As well-versed in loss as they both were, would it be fair to try again? To go through it all and be thrice fated to lose it all?

Do you. . . want. . .? Maegi began, and Mou hummed a soft, low note in trying to assert calm. What can we do?

He is silent; it is not like his old silence, the kind that was thrust upon him by the strangle-hold of teeth, or the doubt that thrived inside of himself. It was thoughtful. It was sad. But he reached to preen at his wife's thin shoulder and whispered to her, We can love, and maybe that's enough.

If they had enough love between the two of them, perhaps the gods would be satiated.