when everything was broken, the devil hit his second stride

Phaedra

she was kicking violently in her sleep, paddling her feet, mumbling mama and papa in tiny, incomplete wisps of breath.

she could see the water speaking. some sibylline dialogue occurring that was bereft of spoken language; images of things the water was passing, feeling, hearing, rumors in its whitewater. not words in her ears, rather, nanosecond snapshots flashing too fast for her to keep up with: salmon, fossil, blood, body, horse, silt, bottlecap ...

her eyes rolled behind paperthin lids, lashes fluttering rapidly.

she was in the water, in that idyllic, terrible backwater, treading like before but making no progress for the plinth upon which mahler had found her. she existed to dread this moment forever.
atop that plinth, fronting prisms of light, were mirages that at first waxed in and out of sight from the interference of water speak.
she tried to clear her vision through blinking, to subdue the water's bruit. when that didn't work, she squeezed her eyes shut, salmon, char, bone, fox, rock, and began to concentrate on the visualization of herself intoning "see, see, see, see, see!"
the water images were instantly behind chiffon,

she let out a sigh.

when she re-opened her eyes, she saw the figures standing on the granite, staring vacantly down at her. mama was there with thade, astraeus, with stag ... then there was papa, standing at the fore with two nondescript cubs at his feet, their faces transforming from nebulose to what she saw when she looked into the water: the purled reflection of herself, though she did not know that's what it was. "leave me alone!" she tried to yell, but instead coughed up dandelion pappus that blustered into their faces, scrambling them again into nebulosity.
"papa! gedmeout the wader! i'ms in the wader!" she gasped. his face was severe, exasperated. "papa ple-please! ich bin ängsdlich!" and with a shimmery, disappointed shake of his head, he cast his eyes down to the two children at his feet and smiled with great pride, turning away with them until the sunlight swallowed their forms.
she heard a mighty crack of the plinth fragmenting.
she looked to thade and astraeus. astraeus' face contorted into something ophidian and not of their world, something nether. he, as well, turned and devotedly followed mahler into the effulgent mouth with a satisfied look describing his countenance.
thade stepped up, his face beamed brightly as he crooned her name encouragingly, "you got this, phae, c'mon, ya just godda-" his leg reaching into the water, she reached back ...

"thadey," phaedra murmured, breaking into a cold sweat. she spasmodically kicked her foreleg out.

before their paws could touch, he vanished into thin air. a piece of the platform broke off with another loud crack.

the water was becoming more insistent, now. she looked to stag and her eyes pleaded with his, but the apathetic expression on his face began to scintillate too. "sdag, i need you, i need yow help! hilf mir, redde mich!", and before turning away from her to walk with the rest, he flatly spoke, not in his own voice, but in that of her father's: "tut mir leid, wenig liebe, das haben sie mir nie beigebracht." and he was swallowed down the throat of light.
a thunder crack. the granite was holding only wylla now. she realised with agony there was no room for her upon the stonework at all.
mama. phaedra whimpered in and out of her dreamscape. "mama—" her ears were underwater now. though her mother's eyes were empty, she could see her smile warmly and mouth something ... but she could not hear her! "i ... the wa— mama, i can'd— i cannod hear you!" she gasped, and closed her eyes tightly and demanded in the deepest wells of thought: let me hear her!
when she opened her eyes, her mother's legs were evanescing into the dust motes that danced in pylons of sunlight. she looked up before her mother could turn away from her too, and heard her speak, words from a smiling mouth that could not have been crueler to ears fraught with the vestiges of hope: "you're making things hard, baby. please stop fighting it, you are not strong enough, phaedra. it's better this way." and then she, too, was gone. the pedestal collapsed into the water, leaving her moorless.
the sunlight evaporated, and all that was left was now a sea of tumultous black water.

devastated, phaedra stopped fighting and felt her body sink into complete oblivion.

"I'MS S-S-SORRY!" she burst awake with a screaming sob. felt the warm trickle under her thighs, seep across the masonry. she lifted her hindleg and looked—why was it that color? her urine was like pure amber. sweat irritated the pads of her feet, the sensation of sitting in a sauna overcoming her. she panted to too great an extent to remain where she was and tucked her tail under her belly as she departed from wylla's (probably startled awake) side to feel the cool breeze outside rake its nails through her fur and calm her trembling limbs.
she swayed on her feet, feeling qualmish and dehydrated. her gums frothed. how long had it been since she'd last drank? she wasn't thinking of these things. her body was putting out water faster than she could quaff it and now the heat syncope was overbearing; phaedra looked to the sky as her head began to swim, watching as the stars began whirling fast and the sound of static filled her ears. "m-aa- i don' feel ..." was all the child could rasp before her weight buckled under tremulous legs as she blacked out.