Nova Peak schädigen

he had not expected her to stop, to do more than whirl away or shrug him aside; point her teeth at his woebegone face and torn out his eye in retribution. but she only stood in a trembling furor of wretchedness; mahler watched as a tear traced a canyon through the velveteen fur upon her cheek —
he ached down to the pit of his bones, hurt in shards, not for himself but for her; coming unraveled from the choking creeping vines that had climbed the whole of him and enfolded him within a blackening dome of rancour.
— heartsong reaching for the moment that she had found him again, or perhaps merely stumbled onto the hollow 
wir hätten dort bleiben sollen
but he had wanted more and more, had wanted to act in the name of his dead brother. stigmata: he still wore that loss so naked in his soul even now.
a second's realization, that mahler had allowed himself to be driven by that sense of failure, that he had allowed stigmata to die; it had beckoned him to retreat into contractual agreements and ambitions that claimed unfettered wildernesses — in the name of the ironstar.
the hollow. mahler knew fiercely and with a great spearing of regret that he should have not left that place, that he should have remained there with wylla in the first filigreed fairy-ring of their recognized love,
but that had been the first selfishness; to move onward and upward, to put the word of a man who had abandoned them over her own. mahler, seeking a brother in the heart of wintersbane, and while he knew it would not be as it was with the basilisk, discovering a respite there. and when that too, had faded, mahler had still not turned to wylla and put her upon the inward promontories of his jagged trust. 
love, then: the conquering of one's self, sisyphus beneath the ponderous brutality of his own expectations. the capturing of things and places. the hierarchy rearranging lashlike and hidden behind his skullplate. bound to himself, unsaid, a series of processes he had always taken for granted.
and wylla, shut out and out evermore, for in turning off with a click the affections he had for all others, mahler had muted his response to her as well.
and he saw it — now! — in the crystalline underbelly of that tear, the curve of it melting against the edge of her small chin —
a funeral dirge with black roses drifting their petals across the pathways of his mind.
aber jetzt ist es zu spät
all this seen in but a fraction of time, as wylla's single eye simmered with a tribulation of tangled emotions.
"i vill show you that i can be better."
the sound muffled to his own ears and scarcely he felt the movement of his lips, a proclamation mahler did not know the end of; 
not the barest etching of hope left in the charnel house of him, but the naked bones of the sentence flaking to ash he swallowed in the following second; a tension as the shadowpriest turned to decamp and let her finally away from the suffering cloy of his presence.
when wylla took another — he yearned to put the shifting shadows of that image from the eye of his mind — in the snows melting to green springtime buds, mahler would depart.
but until that day arrived, he would not remain at sagtannet without working toward atonement.