Bearclaw Valley as you promised me that I was more than all the miles combined

it was all too much.
something in athalia broke this day, in this moment. knees tucked to her chest, curled in a bedraggled ouroboros; she cannot find it within herself to look at ancelin as he gingerly cleans her face, smooths down her fur. and then she hears his voice, and she pieces together notes inside her brain in an effort to make them meaningful to her.
perhaps what she saw in him from the very beginning was an invisible string that tied them together; generations of the same horrific cycle borne from the teeth of the bear's hideous maw. a tragedy that sat in the DNA of them both, shaped them both.
she struggles, glassy eyes blinking slowly as she picks up her head in order to look at him. snot forms a shiny trail down her chin.
family, she echoes, only a fraction of the volume that it had been at prior, prickly and draped in the thorns of retribution. not os-tre-ga. you,
and now she reaches out a trembling forepaw, pressing her own phalanges into the claw that sat curled in the fluff of his chest.
dad.