Nova Peak schädigen

when your children grow up
astarte. brumous. saint. 
they had not grown up, had they? mahler watched as if through a vintage-wrought lookinglass, old warping over memories dredged up by her words.
two sons, a daughter. one son, still. one son, gasping his last; marigold reaching for him, reaching —
her lips forming his name.
and how he had clenched with pain and with terror of the fever, of the black liquid that had risen like silt inside her lungs and poured into her mouth —
and he had run away.
and they don't think about you anymore
but phaedra did not think of him now, did she? even as wylla railed at him, and he listened, chained to this earth and this moment, mahler knew he was completely unaware of where their daughter tread. and astraeus — and 
i would be the one still there, standing beside you. always.
mahler could not conceive of loving anything more than the first breath of a child belonging to him. he had sought midwifery for this simple fact alone: that it was an act of god and the most reverent experience a man could ever share. and he! blessed three times with it, with three children and two, and two — he loved them more because he had not failed at loving his offspring, only their mothers. 
he saw now the rotted core of himself, chewed wood falling away as he grew starveling beneath her tears. again. her tears, which he had caused — again. helpless with the inward masculine instinct to sweep her close, stilled by the sheer hateful act that would be, to pierce her heart and then make some grandiose show,
over and over and over again.
"a mistake?" and his voice cracked, for "loving you vas never a mistake for me, vylla." a mistake? were their children the same? did she in this second feel the deathknell of regret? "not a mistake. but it clearly vas something i should have kept to myself." 
he had wanted to tell her in the snap of her teeth to find another wolf, one who would be the things to her he could not; offering a moth-eaten pauper's strand of threadbare love, and he agreed! at once, in the same fractured tone, "yes." she would have been insulted had he suggested it, but here now, the word deserve and his own name scratched out.
"yes," he said again, and slowly. a wind, climbing the spine of the mountain, pressing suddenly, harshly down upon the individuals therein who stood in another long and pregnant silence.
how long had the first lasted, wylla staring at him, one stricken eye and the other sacrificed in service to this fucking unendingly cold place. to him. the emblem of her love, ripped from her head. and he, offering nothing in return for that.
"you do." again his lips felt molasses, but he experienced the trembling begin in his gut, dread and torment clustering together like pine sap in the low reach of his throat.
had nyx left because he did not love her? mahler had not allowed himself to think that. but he had not loved takiyok either, had felt some great sensation beneath his breastbone for her but believed it to be inferior to the same for wylla. she who had defined the word. and in loyalty to that, he had relinquished all else — even his daughters.
if nyx had left upon her own word and this unspoken want, then full circle it had come. mahler proving his allegiance to this woman over and again with gestures and deeds and decisions that left him raw, but did nothing for her own spirit. he did not think he could ever speak in the language wylla desired, for in his mind he had worked himself to the rawboned scars for her. built walls between any other and his own heart, cut them off, sent them away. set her apart and aside and greater than all else. for that she was, even as she stood tiny and harrowed and infuriated. 
taken his daughters to moonspear voluntarily.
their names beat upon the plantwood core of his heart.
her own hovered upon his mouth.