Sun Mote Copse It's called a lance, hello!

Ugh, I'm feeling all of Niamh's feels.

After a long moment of silence, presumably as Niamh was processing and formulating a response, she began to speak of Colt and Camilla. He had known it would eventually come up, but he hadn't known how to broach the subject, since it was still a sore one for her. Letting her take the lead seemed to be the best option, and his feeling about that was confirmed when she explained why she was bringing it up at all. The question was this: if they were dead, were they still betrothed to their living counterparts?

This was one of those moments he wished that Sequoia was here. She had helped him work through some of his lingering feelings about Camilla when he'd been there, had helped her move on even while she was working through her own feelings about Kiwi, who had apparently been a good friend of hers. Nobody could really know what happened after, although Phox had once been told that you went up into the stars to look down on the world below. You were with everybody, and he tried to put that into words.

I think, he said, trying to channel some Sequoia wisdom, that wherever we go, there's enough of everybody to go around. The way I understand it, we all sorta blend together when we're dead, and we get to mix and mingle with all the things that made us happy without feeling any of the bad feelings. I don't know if that's true, but believing that makes me feel better now, so... it's a coping mechanism, at least. He wanted to say something like, "Camilla would want me to be happy," which was probably true, but he couldn't even bring himself to do that. He didn't know Colt well enough to say that he'd want Niamh to be happy, either. Hadn't Colt stormed off after some stupid fight anyway?

What I do know is that Camilla will always be the mother of Figment and Fennec. She gave me that, and I'll always be thankful for that. But I'm not dead, and I don't want to stop living my life to the fullest because some cruel twist of fate took her away. He knew that Colt's death had been different—violent—but it was still just as cruel. Kiwi had killed him, and Phox clenched his teeth just thinking about it. Relaxing a bit, he continued. I want to be happy. I want to be a good dad to Figment and Fennec, and that requires me being happy. And part of what makes me happy is having somebody by my side. There was Towhee, of course, but that was an entirely different kind of relationship.