Ouroboros Spine xlvv. before he gets there

Im sorry to hear about that omg! I’m glad you’re doing alright though <3

Sometimes, between death and life, something gets tangled. A celestial bureaucratic issue, if you would. Some spirits come up eligible for new life, others instead were shipped off to wherever it was they went among the stars.

Across a thousand miles of plain and prairie and forest and desert, a white tailed doe lowered her head to the ground. The matriarch of her herd, the lead doe until her age got the best of her. Her buck had moved on, her fellows leaving her behind. It was alright, she understood perfectly what her role was to be, watching fawns stumble behind their mothers with their too long limbs and spotted coats. She was to be a distraction so her sisters could run. And it was a role she was happy to fulfill, knowing this finality wouldn’t be her swan song. The matriarch gave a wet sounding noise, taken over by the consistent cough that had spelled her downfall, as the coyotes that had been harassing the fawns finally made it to her. Liquid browns closed as ivory flashed, and the matriarch knew no more.

At the same time as she died, something else was living for the first time. In a mistake that would bring about a lifetime of red tape, an overworked celestial paper pusher pushed the wrong paper. Instead of inhabiting another of her kind, the matriarch was born again into something else. Doe became fawn became wolf became cub. Prey settling into predator’s skin, the only sign of what she had been shifting color and settling across her face, ink splotches on beige.

Vairë was brought into the world with her first breath smelling of doe’s last, third born and first daughter, a tiny grub that would one day become more. Doe matriarch faded into the recesses of the young mind, and Vairë simply squeaked, long and loud, bleating like the fawn her spirit should have settled in, before calming at the touch of the rest of her siblings, content in the pile of pups.