Wheeling Gull Isle Never does the dream come true.

back dated to *vague gesturing* shortly after Heda dies ;-; Sorry it’s so late - I wanted his current thread with Heda to progress a little first. AW! tags for reference: @Malakai @Heda

He couldn’t do it. 

Selfish, maybe - but what drove him now through the sleeting misery of rain was an obstinate sense of loyalty. His sons deserved a mother. 

And he —

Heda’s scent had been so very difficult to pull from the threads of winter and dead earth. Her progress had been affected by the disease that ransacked her senses — the only saving grace in this wretched situation. Anselm more than once doubled back — and when he hit the shore he lost her scent entirely, its molecules ripped apart by the scouring tongue of the wind. 

But he had known, looking at that distant island, that it had been their home once. 

On the beach, he recognized one other stale scent lingering. The daughter with the oozing head wound. 

He crossed the choppy water and by no small miracle made it to the other side. Emerging dripping wet and cold, Anselm found no trace of her here. 

It was not until he crossed over a bare and sorrowed hill that he picked up another trace; fading, but there. 

Burying his head into the stiffened winter grass, Anselm inhaled desperately; he sniffed over every bare patch, he raked, he crossed back to the first scent over and over and over and yet still he could not make sense of the pattern; 

Until at last his eyes were drawn to the long hill and the pieces — if they could be called that — began to play in his head. 

Dread filled his senses. He knew her march was likely fatal — but he needed his own closure. He needed to know she had not been dramatic; and a huge, aching part of him wished this to be so. Wished that she was being myopic, or pessimistic — or anything but dead. 

The scents here were thin, abused by the raw air. He searched desperately for more clues, but there was only a handful — and their offering so scant that he was left with little. 

Sitting down, exhausted beyond reckoning and on the cusp of a bitter sob, Anselm’s gaze turned across the copse and fell — with a chill shuddering through him — on a fresh patch of disturbed earth.