Razorback Ridge ᴠᴇʀᴄɪɴɢᴇᴛᴏʀɪx

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our first love is when we are young. it’s the idealistic love  –  the one that seems like the fairytales we read. we enter into it with the belief that it this will be our only love and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t feel quite right, or if we find ourselves having to swallow our personal truths to make it work, because deep down we believe that this is what love is supposed to be. it's a love that looks right.  @Maegi.

Vercingetorix  —
first love, first litter.

She had come to the wilds some soul-broke starkindler; searching for a brother who she had failed to wrest from falling time and again. She had been hunted and guided; had fallen so hastily, so harrowingly, entirely without a mote of hesitation as to what might come of such feverish, favorable unions. She had healed him twice, had been late, much too late for that third time. He had gone away from the montane birthsground of their children and in turn, she had begun to wander; he had come back, once, with the promise of retrieval upon his lips as he looked into the eye that still saw. He had left.

And she had not been able to wait any longer for him to make good on it.

So, she had arrow'd herself for vagrant basilisk @Stigmata; had swept her then-children @Dragomir and Isilmë to wend with her through these very spires; had toted along a champion who had only been a little more than fellow shadow. Had parted from all three in the vanquishing of her own haunt; had fled to the harpy's rest by the sea that the cheka had been so keen to usurp in secrecy. There had, then, been the matter of her son's dreadful capture and subsequent cruciation, the riverlands, the fraying family ...

In the end, though, she had left them, entire. Had let that hopeless, worn despondency wear her down in the wake of forsaking all that which could not be mended with Vercingetorix; to the point where it felt as if something broke within her, and she could not look upon the father or his children the same way. Until the time came when she saw @Hydra's invitation not as an opportunity for accord, but as an escape  –  however temporary.

And then she had been struck, sundered by the heavens' cleavings; had then striven to stride a different, decidedly more charitable pursuit in her life than that of failed motherhood.

She breathes it all in, now: that half of Aurëwen that still lingers, faded as ivy crept up her mending soul. The guilt; the murmurings of shame. Moonspear, for all its cruel ideals, was the mother of the children she had banished herself from  –  not ever she.

She must make peace with herself if she is to begin anew. So she exhales, airless;
and lets that first love of the starry-eyed wanderer go, well and truly.

Lets it be.