Wheeling Gull Isle maybe it’s not the moon at all

Rainsong Labyrinth had been her place once. Hers and Moorhen’s.

Coelacanth crumpled in the rubble of Komodo’s incensed exodus, nursing wounds no wolf could see; she tucked her nose firmly into her feathered plume and trembled spasmodically. Had she been able, the inkdark Aralez would have loosed a litany of keening cries — but her anguish was locked beneath the weight of her tuneless throat and every lonely lyric died aborning. She felt the blind wanting of her body and the fierce weeping of her heart in equal measure and it manifested itself in an overwhelming case of allodynia that kept her from moving for some time. Even the singing water around her was painful in its own way. She loved it here — she loved it! — but the blue sanctuary was profaned by what had occurred, and she dragged herself away. Her gait was choppy and stiff as she emerged gingerly from the glowing maze and limp-staggered south in an uneven zigzag.

When she reached the edge of the Southern Strand, Coelacanth looked back over her shoulder to where Moorhen and Stockholm waited. What would they say if they knew what she had done? She believed wholeheartedly that somehow, this was all her fault — she had broken something that could not ever be fully repaired, but, by all the fish in the sea, she didn’t know how she’d done it! “Bad dog?” she asked her reflection in the water, stretching out on her belly and pillowing her chin on her paws to stare at the water-rippled rendition of herself. She didn’t look any different, so why was Komodo acting like she was someone she wasn’t? Maybe she was stupid after all — the woman had said as much when Seelie’d tried to alert her of intruders and pepper her face with kisses.

She stared at herself and loathed what she saw until she could bear her self-flagellation no longer. She wanted to be away from here — so, on aching paws, she crossed the sandbar.