Sleepy Fox Hollow shadows that lift off the bloom and the velvet

i

setting: nautical twilight, so an hour pre dawn. day after this. pls dont match length i hate that i do this lmfao. & sorry it took me a solid minute <3 
mahl is also welcome!

hours marched on and she slept and she slept until she could do it no more. dreamless and still as starlight, until the loons eldritch, cackling tremolos waned, and in their place mourning doves followed the rumors of new day with their coo-ca-coo. 

when phaedra rolled indolently to her back and lipped at the dewpearled grass, the universe let out a huff and how-about-this! in the form of an elk bugling from a near meadow — nothing like the shriek of a nazgul first thing to stir the blood. 

startled, in her struggle phae’s spine folded itself into an origami giraffe before she managed to right herself.

once up on her feet, the girl shook free of damp earth and looked around. @Mahler hadn't roused her the second night (or if he did, she’d been so sleep-drunk she’d automated the task), and thus phaedra assumed there’d been no overnight decline in her mother's wellbeing. 

rusty door-hinge yawn complete, she scanned for their sleeping forms, feeling her cheeks dimple at the gained sight of the pair. well. quite nearer to each other than they were to her when she awoke, but their child was an active sleeper. all elbows and hare-thumps to the face of anyone brave enough to share her space. 

phaedra watched the rise of @Wylla's flank for a few moments longer, each breath held before misting hope, until she felt reassured that a walkabout wouldn't spell her mother's death. 

away under a sky indigo-cool and wind bracing to the skin, back when eastern clouds were visible. she dropped a brace of grouse, left once more and returned once more with a muskrat. 

fur dripping and smelling fusty, the girl pantingly slumped to her belly and set to unfurling skin from bone, removing the heart and liver and flinging them at wylla's feet before reprising her task with the gamebirds. 

gnawing on vertebrae, her stomach loudly purled as if to say 'is that all we get!?'; she shifted her weight to prop against thin hip, paying the hunger cue no more mind than she usually did. 

but ponderous on her conscience — if they could not fell larger quarry, it was bird innards, a marsh rat, and berries withal meant to sustain them homeward.