Sawtooth Spire Will I ever be more than I've always been?

skipping bruce wyllas with permission 

a galvanized scourge above her, a blood-riven face; the eye of the storm was truly the calmest place to be. 

now back to this meaning, littlest Phaedra, to puddle-jump from your start to your finish?

moments. just moments, was all it was, this time of hers spent in the nether. neither alive nor dead, just a soul clinging to the leg of its husk as the pulse still whispered under-breath. but as just moments became half another moment (time wasted; fully formed egos would always be ruiners of children) that whisper became a secret.

for the best, she was unconcerned with the chaos of triage and senseless to the compressions that might have otherwise pained her, the vigorous rubbings, anguished emotion filtering through the interstices of concentration as her father voicelessly pleaded with her lifefull-lifeless body to renegotiate with him. she was oblivious that the stormclouds of Wylla and Mahler now loomed overhead, gusting in concert, perhaps joined in paroxysms of grief and agony wrought from the callused palms of what could only work with the most honest of loves like smelted quartz and turn it into a life most certainly not meant to just shatter. 

indestructible, was it not? love borne for one's child was a love borne in quartz; it could not be destroyed, but the body itself was forged from mere glass and new souls were clumsy little things. 

in a culmination of those moments, she wasn’t entirely dreamless. while the universe reconsidered its verdict, a chaplet of gilt twine playfully wound its way ‘round her innermost self, like a strand of the thinnest possible hairs, dithering and scintillating and tickling under-chin … drawing her back into some manner of unconscious lucidity. 

as like some warmer mercy intervening on this begetter of a most cruel destiny, saying,
to her i will bare a small thread of life, and her curiosity or lack thereof will see my decision made. 

with intrigue she pursued the dancing shimmer and midst its whirling dervish a giggle burst in the privacy of her mind. in that instant, she was foisted from the anchor that sought to tow her, tempt her with the comfortable abyss like the Serpent to her falling Eve. no, it was not time. the weight lifted and she floated up with the scintillant fibril in lead, up ever so high, until something like a water’s surface broke over her face. 

then puddle-jumper she is not.

Phaedra’s sunken sides heaved and then onto the floor she spewed a watery stream, all the remaining fluid purged from her lungs by Mahler’s adept exertion. her nose welled out the same substance simultaneously. once of vital importance to her life, this sap of birth, this requirement of her living within another—not a moment longer welcome to her body. it left a small but ugly-memoried stain on the frostbitten soil beneath them.

face wet, her mouth finally cleaved and a tongue more suitably pink unfurled. she grunted, and coughed, and then trilled loudly as her lungs expanded with more freedom to do so. she laboriously worked through some breaths between cries and, exposed to the verglas lance of the breeze, her moonmade body started to tremble. her energy was still depleted, but despite that the doctor's patient trundled off her gurney Phaedra squirmed on her champion's paw and rocked off, landing upon her back between both feet that dwarfed her. feeling the soreness in her back, her tail and legs curled to her center like a poked-at pillbug.

brows formed in discontent furrowed and unfurrowed, as if in a dilemma about her present circumstances. disdaining the deep chill in her bones and the ache in her blood-mantled shoulders, and as if slowly also realizing the lack of milk in her belly, the babe bleated shrilly in his face like the ovarian delight she was.

she settled into quieter grizzling, however, and puzzlement, when she found that reaching out the mite pads of her paw connected to something wet and warm. tears, still-warm blood, or the hot breath from his nostrils, whatever it was, she pressed her foot against it and sighed.