Lion Head Mesa Crows will hang pine boughs at your window,

second-entering-third day after this

She had spent a whole day and then some by the body of Maegi.

Birds had come for it and she shooed them out with snipping teeth. She found a harsh need to keep the body forever, to hold it and never let it go. Let the cold body melt into her own and from those things, she carried the fresh stench of death. Whatever the body had released in those thirty-or-forty-so hours she had spent by it —

Her.

Maegi.

Nona.

Love always.

— had pressed into the furs of Jakoul. Wrought her into a foul beast, the harbinger of death in a way she loathed so deeply. Maegi was not supposed to die. Not yet. Maybe she could turn around, bring the body back out of where she had stashed it away with great care, and Maegi would rise once more. It all had been nothing more than a horrible, dark fantasy.

But the reality of it all clung to her in putrid clumps of fur.

She sank along the border of Akashingo in the dead of night. A mourning sound screeched from her lungs with every last tired cell she could muster into the act.

She wished for the abyss.

She waited for @Ramesses in a stupor.