Herbalists' Cache cen

chaos reigned.
it tore through the birthing place like a storm through dry bone—shouts, screams, snarls. blood already on the wind. her children were here. their cries pierced her ears, a song of terror, and her heart split open with it.
she had tried to run. but she did not go far. in the outskirts she had dug, hard and fast, and let fa'liya slip down with the caribou hide upon her shoulders. wrapped in furs, she planted a kiss, before returning to her snow shelter.
no! morwenna snapped, her voice thunder through the madness, searching, frantic, for each small soul she had birthed in pain and now would kill to protect.
but the smell—blood. she turned sharply.
ishmira—! her voice cracked as she saw the woman thrown down like carrion, sun eater ripping into her, shredding with blind rage. the bastard, the monster, his own blood in her jaws and he didn’t care. didn’t see. couldn’t stop.
morwenna launched.
she was muscle and instinct, teeth bared as she surged across the battlefield. she caught the scent of ridgeback in the corner of her mind, the snap of black hawk’s jaws clashing with meleys. others fought. but this was hers.
her babies. her wolves. her war.
she hurled herself at the tangle of blood and fur that was sun eater, going not for his shoulders but low—lower—seeking to unbalance, to drive her shoulder beneath his ribs and heave. get him off. get him off her. then, to snap her teeth at the soft flesh of his belly.
there was no crown here. no elegance. no matriarch.
only a mother. and the mother was done waiting.