Noctisardor Bypass Life, Death, Religion, Survival

cameo, back at den <3

while rivenwood fell to pieces around her ears, heda dreamed.
it was a waking dream, of course a, a glaze-eyed dream where she cradled each child to her breast until she knew the size and shape of all six, their voices, their opening eyes. their little voices.
druid was gone. druid was there. speech had fled heda for now — again? — and she retreated into the warm silence of instinct and the love she felt truly for the babes she tended.
eight gone.
six here.
she thought of them as her own more and more each day, sensing with the keen knowing of an animal at last what her sister lacked.
the world outside the den ceased to matter; where druid grew hollow, heda grew round, flanks filling and face softening to less angularity.
and as her body experienced this soft shifting of unforgiving soil into terra madre, so did her mind fly, and fly and fly, until heda felt each hour of the day she lived upon the island.
she might point out the waving lavender to one or other of the children — it did not exist.
or the gulls; she would swear she heard them calling, and smile softly to herself, curling around a nursing pup.
surrender — ah — it was sweet and good and did not let go of her.
"glaukos?" she called out one morning. or was it morning? heda did not know and found she did not care. the bear-man did not answer and so she closed her eyes again with a little sigh and settled back into her daffodil dreaming, imagining psalm swimming in the blue water, just ahead of her, just beyond her.