Larksong Grotto untitled tapes

They’d been back a week. Masquerade didn’t want to infringe on the Redtails, though she plucked a dead rabbit out of a cache near the base of the peak and began carrying it toward Larksong Grotto. The reason she didn’t continue past that wasn’t because of her hesitation to encroach on her family’s territory, it was due to the cramp so wretched, it physically stopped her in her tracks.

It wasn’t a sharp pain, like a tooth or claw slicing open her lower stomach, but it was intense. She gasped, the dead hare falling from her mouth. It felt almost as if someone had reached inside her, grabbed a fistful of internal organs, squeezed and began slowly pulling them out of her body by way of her nethers. Masque’s teeth clenched as the wave of pain crested, receded—a second, different sort of gasp—and then built again.