Nova Peak dearly

“Jeg…elsker dig… Skorpa...”
The den would echo her stifled cries, lips taut and gnawed until they ran with blood, Skorpa mouthbent as if tending a wound. But wolf-teeth cut jagged, meant not to incise but tear. Ayovi had filtered her screams into straining grunts heaved into the stone, driving outward from her inwardness, taking their place among the elements of the frozen morning.
Suddenly she feels herself split in two and carved, flesh giving way to even more stretching. It is a sharp,  outer-body pain that radiates into her chest where she struggles to breathe, struggles to register the existence of anything at all.

Until it no longer matters. None of it.

Because a face comes into view— a tiny, squirming, perfect red face and nothing else exists in the world. The falcon. @Nowke. Ayovi’s nose raises instinctively as Skorpa lays him against her bare belly. Him; cut as clearly from Skorpa’s bleeding heart as any child could be. Tears drown her frozen cheeks as she fusses over their son, tongue clearing the airways of a tiny mouth and biting the cord that binds them.
Then she meets her second pup, her gorgeous, redheaded girl with a face flowering and bright as the moon. The stote. @Mitoge. She trembles and cries and stares and stares. Exhausted, awed, brimming with a joy she had never before known, Ayovi holds her daughter at last.
With her strength's final momentum she waits for the third.
May they live at all…
A face is there, held aloft by the tender jaws of her father. A daughter of pure dove-white with the north’s bloodmarked mask. Ayovi cannot speak, but then there could be no words to frame what passes silently between mother and daughter, so strong and incomprehensible. The fawn. Her little @Chipeta. Upon each nursing babe and down the side of her youngest’s cheek do mother’s tears spill. Her lip trembles as she looks fearfully for Skorpa.
“Does she… breathe? Does she… live?”