Moonspear procedures

Hoping for @Olive?

Alya was a bit confused, but determined to get to the bottom of this. She and @Hydra had compared notes - oddly differing notes - and both understood that their mother could be a cagey creature. They trusted her, of course, but also knew her power. She could say something that was completely true, but at the same time, completely misleading. It was part of why they loved her.

They knew that, if they wanted to get answers, they'd have to broaden their horizons. For this reason, Alya was following the scent-trails left by the four newcomers, intending to confront the pale shewolf that'd arrived with her young charges. Being a mother, Olive would surely know the intricacies of producing offspring and falling in love.

Olive still reeled from the happening.

If the wastrel had thought she’d known pain, she had been sorely mistaken. Nearly ever night found her in tears, weeping delicately [yet with force!] as she lamented the losing of her kindred spirit. Olive cried openly in from of her children, holding them tight in their last days of nursing — they knew something had happened, knew it from the squall of energies she brought into their den, but would not remember. It was one of the only solaces that Olive could find those days: that her children would grow to never know the poignancy of their babyhood.

It was a situations she quite never had imagined herself to be in. She had been reborn when her and Dakarai’s souls collided, and for so long she imagined he would be her death, too. No matter the pain she felt inside, it was word from the gods and it must be obeyed; lest the star-crossed lovers bring more sadness upon each other, Aries, Cassiopeia and the wolves of Moonspear. The gods were not interested in pandering loyalties, only wholehearted enlightenment and demanded her compliance — her torment was a clear sign of her dedication. 

Surely, they would be pleased with her now.

The worst was how her mind called out for him. At every moment she wondered what he was doing, knowing full and well the knight was upon the mountain… somewhere, doing something, Did his soul bleed for her, as hers did for he — or did he simmer in his anger and let his darkness take over? Oh, how she wished she could go to him, embrace the brooding rogue, kiss away the sadness and tell him it would all be okay? 

In her mind, she had imagined she and Dakarai could coexist, still very much in love and delighting in every part of it, but distant enough to not incur the wrath of the gods. Admiration without the dedication; it would have been a thing of beauty, but the time for such things had passed. Her love for Dakarai was not something that could be broken up and made piecemeal  — it was an all or nothing sort of deal. Where there once was all there now was nothing and, like an addict, she needed to purge Dakarai from her system. 

Only when she realized there was life beyond him, would she be able to move on. 

Dakarai had taken the children, though the mother worried about leaving the month-old pups with a man in such a state. Where Olive was diaphanous, Dakarai was a conflagration — but she knew his love for his children would never be touched by his resentment of her. But still, seeing her king for even a moment had shaken her so the druid took a silent tour of the mountainside and eventually ran into the girl Hydra. 

“Hydra,” she hymed softly, coming up behind the inky shewolf and not realizing her mistake.  “Hello.”

Alya wagged her tail, yipping cheerily as the woman came into view and quickly misidentified her. "Lyra, actually," she simpered with a shy duck of her head. "You're thinking of my twin sister - there are two of us, and no one can really tell us apart."

Mentally cackling to herself, Alya peered down at the shewolf's hanging teats. "You're Olive, right? I was actually hoping to speak to you."

The girl, with her leer and sweet voice, was clearly not Hydra. Olive could not help but feel the area between her shoulder blades unpinch and her demeanor relaxed somewhat. The dark girl — one of three, so it seemed — made Olive uncomfortable, though the druid was loathe to admit it. Perhaps it had been the way Hydra had been present at not one but two of her son’s chastenings that gave her unease, as such negative experiences were prone to do… But Olive felt there was a dangerous miasma that surrounded the hellhound and found she could not relax in her presence.

But this was not Hydra — It was Lyra, a sister she had yet to meet, and she seemed nice. ”Oh,” Olive echoed, and for a moment her eyes soft, but then suddenly her pupils constricted, her heart lurched and the mother’s mossy gaze steeled somewhat intensely into Lyra’s own. What had Aries done now? Did this entire family harbor a hatred for her only remanent boy? What awful tidings did she bring? 

"I am," she spoke — and for that moment, Olive was certain that the words uttered from Lyra’s mouth would be the harbinger of some sort of doom. There were so few good things that happened anymore [her children being 100% of those], and yet, so many sad things too. It was wildly out of proportion! Whatever Lyra had to say would surely result in her family’s uprooting from yet another pack — because that’s what the druid had been conditioned to believe. Perhaps the gods were not yet done with her; she had not gotten far enough away from the dark night to appease them rightly. They were not yet satisfied with her sacrifice.

Despite the storm that brewed within, Olive kept her exterior cool. ”I would not turn away a friend,” came her delicate voice, speaking kindly — her nervousness palpable only in the whispering and wavering of her voice. Internally, she braced herself.

"Good," said Alya, her voice a little off from Lyra's gentle nature, but she didn't expect Olive to know that. Not yet, anyway. (Perhaps, months from now, she will know them well enough to look back on this behavior and wonder.) "I want to be a healer and a caregiver when I'm big, and my mother said that it might be good to talk to you. I've already talked to her, of course, about pregnancy and child-bearing and all that - but she said it was different for everyone, and that I should get your opinion, too."

Having finished the explanation she'd rehearsed, Alya sat back and stared expectantly at Olive, waiting for her to take the bait. Alya didn't have any more specific question about the process - not yet, anyway. She felt that, the more knowledge she failed to have on the subject, the more suspect her motives would become.

Again, olive responded with a wispy ”oh,” and an equally as soft giggle. Pregnancy and child bearing? Oh, this was one of Olive’s favorite topics. Having experienced the act for herself, the woman knew it to be a divine and godlike process — beautiful in a way that only new life could be beautiful. Perhaps in another life she’d rise to the occasion of becoming a midwife, considering her passion for the art, but she simply did not have the healing knowledge to do so.  “I am no healer,” the lamb conceded, but she quickly followed up brightly with

“Some of the best wolves I’ve known have been caregivers.” 

The realize had come to her very quickly, and it was without a doubt that Olive was thinking  Hemlock and Carina. The two women had both been healers and she owed them much. The woman once called Isley has aided her her castigation from Teaghlaigh, yes, but in her prayer and her devotionals she had come to experience a strange sort of gratitude that was not given to Arturo or Lotte or any of the others — for Hemlock had taken her son in and was, with any hope, treating Sirius as she would her own son.  It took a wolf of strong spirit to do such thing for a women she considered an enemy. 

Carina had been another case entirely — served to a group of wolves calling for her own death; sacrificed for her own enciente, dreadful life. Olive was certain it was her pregnancy that had saved her and Dakarai, as Ceannasach was much to staunch in his perturbed ethics to serve the parents of unborn children to the blackfeather hellhounds. And so sweet Carina had gone in her stead — and Olive did not know if the silent girl was alive or not  — and guilt of it wrought her gut and kept her up at night. But the druid could not show it, lest the Moonspear wolves become curious of their past treacheries. So she swallowed her sadness over her Carina’s death, believing herself not to be worthy.

With Carina’s death, the world had lost some of its light. 

Olive swallowed thickly. “All I have is my own experience, but i’m more than happy to share what I know.” There was a momentary lapse in speaking, and the mother wondered if Lyra knew the questions she wished to ask — it seemed she did not, so Olive filled in the silence with a quick question. ”Of what are you most curious? There was so much to be said about this subject, and Olive did not want to misrepresent herself. “Do you wish to be a mother one day, too?”