Hideaway Strath you say i am wilderness.

for @Leigh sorry for the wait on this!

It was not as if some great transformation had taken place (okay, maybe it had but it wasn't a noticeable one at first) and morphed her body, screaming with silent signs and signals that Ix Chel had blessed her with children. It was subtle and slow, little things that she might've missed had the midwife not been paying very close attention to her body, praying and hoping for it to be true. That was how the inkling first began to nestle in her brain.

Her hips and lower back had begun to ache -- particularly in the morning when she woke and at night before she settled in with Vein. Occasionally she found herself light-headed and feeling sick to her stomach, mainly when she bent over to work at some task or stayed in the sun for too long. She was hungrier than usual and found that she tired far more easily, needing to retire to her den often to rest or sleep. But it was the fur that had never quite come back in after her heat -- the silky tufts having shed from her underbelly rather early -- that began to give her the idea that life blossomed in her womb. 

Even so, The Priestess didn't want to jinx things by confirming her suspicions -- verbally or even mentally to herself despite her experience in the field of midwifery. She wasn't completely certain until she went for a walk along the green shores of Mosses Beach, hunting after something to make her evening meal before searching for something she could take back to the den for Vein to eat. Before long, the sprite of winter spotted the silver-green gleam of a mountain whitefish flickering in the shaded, cool depths of the bank's overhanging grasses.

The halfling lowered herself, creeping over the slight rise and leaping nimbly into the creek to pounce atop the fish -- jaws snapping shut around it as her breath stilled and her head plunged beneath the shallow waters. She emerged victorious, the whitefish clamped snugly in her jaws only to promptly spit out the slain swimmer with a dry gag of disgust as the taste exploded over her tongue.

The sighthound who had once been Awenfen stilled in the shallows, dripping with the pungent summer smell of creekwater as she stared at the fish in utter shock. For she'd only ever hated fish when she was pregnant.