Arrow Lake you're just another brick and i'm a sledgehammer

When River woke, it was pitch dark.

She blinked, sluggishly coming realize that every part of her ached as if she had been in a fight or had taken a great fall. The air, too, seemed just as stiff, laden with the smell of blood and bodily secretions that her brain (temporarily) could not decipher. But it was not the stagnant permeation of scents or the dull throbbing of her body that she became most aware of.

It was the writhing at her belly; the squirming along the fringes of her underside that she felt most intensely.

The feeling of pups suckling. Of tiny bodies thriving.

River's memory of the day ebbed and flowed, coming and going just as her consciousness did. She couldn't even stay awake long enough to count how many were latched. And though she was also aware of someone else there in den, she could not muster the strength to wonder about them too long before she was away again — exhausted from the ordeal, spent beyond repair, for the time being.

It would be many hours more before she could recall the event in full, let alone greet the lives she had brought into the world.