Sawtooth Spire Will I ever be more than I've always been?

Set March 4th, posting a day early just because it works best with my work schedule!

The last days of Wylla's pregnancy were spent in agitated pacing. She'd worn a track in the dirt outside her whelping den and her paw pads were sore and bruised, but she couldn't help it. No position was comfortable. She was restless if she tried to stay still, so walking was the lesser evil, even if it took its toll on her body in other ways. She knew, unlike the last time when she'd known jack shit, that her time was close, and in the late hours of the night, she retired into her den to prepare.

Labour started in the early morning and lasted an hour, maybe a little more, before the first meaningful contraction came. The pup she birthed was larger than Tiercel had been, or maybe it just felt harder because this time, she wasn't walking around mid-labour thinking her stomach was just upset. The pain was more immense and the process slower, but in the end, she cleaned a healthy dark-furred baby boy while retching on the amniotic sac (still disgusting, btw), christened him @Thade, and nudged him into place along her stomach.

Having decided that she was only carrying a single pup this year, Wylla laid her chin across her forelegs and prepared herself to sleep. The pain stretched taut along her abdomen refused to wane, and for a long time, she ignored it. Her memory of giving birth before was hazy; hadn't it hurt for a while afterward? She was convinced that it had and she fell into a light doze until at last her body had enough of that shit and reminded her sharply that bitch, you're not done yet.

Because she'd been basically sitting on the process for at least half an hour, the second baby came fast compared to Thade. A much smaller cub from first appearances, and a lighter shade than her brother, but still dark brown for now like most cubs tended to be. @Phaedra, she decided. Wylla cleaned her as well, thinking painfully of Tiercel all the while, and when the pain began to ebb away, she finally curled her body around the two newborns and closed her eyes. Even if she slept now her ears remained alert, her senses hyperfocused. The only wolf who had a hope in hell of getting close to her now was @Mahler, and even he was likely to be chased away with bared teeth for at least a few days.

me: it'll be short
also me:

she was serenely buoyant, blissful; utterly untroubled by the crises of knowing things and of her own existence and unburdened by expectations to be anything but what she was––a uterine barnacle. she’d long since gotten used to whiling the weeks away with nothing to entertain herself with except playing kickball with organs and the occasional intrigued prod of exterior noses. if it came with the tide, she found the most enjoyably kickable thing was her brother. though this emotion—delight—could not yet be expressed through giggles or smirks, it was surely extant somewhere deep within her mind anytime she successfully right-hooked the trespasser.

lacking the spatial awareness that would advise her of her sausage-link of a wombmate’s earlier departure (first class passengers, pfft, amirite), she hadn’t yet felt life’s tether start to tow her downstream, though tow it did. Wylla’s earlier fretful pacing had the effect of cradling her to sleep, but some of the mother-to-be’s agitated stress came down the gangline and had her bun-in-the-oven feeling crusty as well. that was, until she startled herself with a case of the hiccups. Phaedra The Unheralded One silently cried out and midst that, hiccuped again. with a clouded brow, she writhed and assembled martyred looks as best a fetus could, but the fits continued. as did her distress. and her martyrdom. 

that was the worst thing about her day by far, until the biggety biatch miracle of life had to go and further tear the butt out of her chi. the machinist in this sausage factory was suddenly courteously insistent that she make like a tree and fuck off.

um, yeah, OSHA will be hearing about this.

at once she was aware of a warm cinch, next of being passed through a narrow entrance by the might of powerful and insuperable propulsion. her body was thrust by thew through the tight corridor and she couldn’t conceive of why her world was now warping and wefting and then she was suddenly obliged to—well, strictly speaking this was all being done without her consent, soooo: dragooned into making her way down the assembly line until—seriously? until—

as unceremoniously as a goldfish going down the toilet, she was flushed through the birthing canal, urged by a final, strongly summoning contraction. her stubborn preference to stick lichen-like to the familiar, tropical climes of her vessel went entirely unheeded and hand-waved by the higher-ups and thus, her safe passage was enforced and not long after that, what some precious few might call a “blessed event” ensued. 

obeying (and being conscious of a distaste for doing such a thing) the laws of gravity from the final heave-ho, following a gush of watery substance, was the second of Wylla’s daughters. she was “gently” ejected from her former capsule and found herself quietly joining the outer realm without so much as a complaint or even a curtsy. there. born. happy? let's keep going.

she had not registered any sensation during the transition from womb to earth-side, all save for the abrupt freedom from that overbearing, squeezing, grandmotherly embrace of muscles that had worked overtime to unlade her. the recollection of such a feeling, however, was soon nothing but a light posse of fireflies in her memory … and then their evasive light glimmered, dulled, and blinked into nothingness.  

fresh from the oven, the savory broth in the amniotic sac enshrining Phaedra kept her complacent and warm and drowsing despite the displacement from her roost of some months. unfortunately, her acquaintance to what would inevitably amount to an entire girlhood of hazing experiences with Her Audacity was met in the form of dove-like teeth pecking and plucking at the pellucid caul until the membranes bassineting her burst apart. before all the liquid it contained could be strewn beneath them all, another hiccup spasmed and stirred her frame, and she respired some of the fluid that had at one time kept her so safe, drawing it into her nose and lungs.

there was no doubt that whelpbearing was as messy as it was theatrical; the cherub had plopped out like an egg yolk and squandered to the ground like one too (not sunny side up), then cast motionlessly against the pelt soaked with lochia. thankfully only one of the sundry dry and insulating peltries lain across the den floor, this one was assuredly gone to rack and ruin by the various secretions and gore of labor.

dampened by the flotsam of afterbirth, an unwelcome chill slipstreamed through Phaedra’s body, now tenderly convulsing from the cold wet. she would have mewled in a row of self-pity, but something occluded her throat and before anything could draw attention to her state of sudden malaise, a jab of snuffling leather fretting over every hair of her length and girth disrupted her senses, and what felt like a heavy tapestry swathed her back and neck and head and, ahem, impolite elsewheres too. 

disgruntled by the rousting but unable to advocate for herself (or bitch out her aquatic ancestors for not blessing her with anatomy capable of sign language), she simply pancaked on the ground until her afflicter was satisfied with their work.

vexed so, but more or less cleansed of mucid-filth and the squalor of earth, Phaedra remained as she was, and would remain, until forcibly moved. it was evident she was fated to be a lady fair judging by the pale ashen looks of her (in comparison to her slate brother); in later weeks, it could be said that she may as well have been heisted from a clutch of cygnets, rather than from a holt of badgers.  

she strained her neck with great effort and gaped, her tongue poked out grayish blue, but nary a sound was borne on any hearing or unhearing ears. presently, a dreadful tightening feeling returned and this was pervasively different from being hugged in the womb. the feeling was one of something constringing her insides, instead. the touch of pain came shortly and escalated swiftly to a fierce battering ram against her tiny breast: a bearing down on lungs still congested with enough amnion fluid to intercept her first thin cry, her first true breath of air. she weakly tried to gasp but it gave her little relief.  

she was deposited alongside the warm, teat-hasped body of her brother (who paid her as little mind as she did him as he suckled away, white foam frothing his gums) but Phaedra refused to latch herself, making no attempt on the teat presented to her; the instinct to root for milk was obscured by her vignetting interior world, and so she merely lay there listless and dim against the murmuring heartbeat of her mother. if this disinterest in feeding did not inform Wylla of the trouble her lastborn was in, as her lethargy had initially failed to (having neither squirmed nor bleated her first spiriting cries while being bathed), the girl was ere-long to expire without even a plaint in her throat. 

already, she was nothing if not willful, however. tumbling over one of Wylla's lissom forelegs, with the last traces of lucidity beginning to grow feeble, she mustered all the strength left in her little body to bid binch i can’t breeeeathe in the very faintest of wheezing, phlegmy coughs—grave and distant as the anchor dragging her ever downward.

crushing, drowning—it all climbed on her senses.

after the struggling rasps, somnolence swaddled her and unconsciousness took her, helped her descend from the dreadful outerworldly sensations and sink deeply into oblivion.

for days mahler had stayed as close to wylla as he might, careful of her snapping temper and accompanying teeth. the gargoyle departed only to assuage his own protectiveness with a tight patrol of the surrounding area, returning to the woman's densite when he had finished.
wylla had not wished aid in her whelping. this tormented mahler beneath an undercurrent of guilt for the relief he had felt. unsure of how well he might perform his tasks beneath the impending weight of fatherhood, mahler contented himself with an outdoor vigil, laid in the melting snow to ward away any well-wishers.
the practiced ears of a midwife knew the sounds of any birth, and the doktor, who had brought his small wrap of necessary herbs all the same, shifted closer to the mouth of the whelping shelter.
breath held, he listened to wylla's sounds, marveling at her restraint. auds cupped forward with curiosity and wonder as first the copper tang of birth unfurled into the air, accompanied quickly by a brief retch and then the rich scent of milk.
mahler rocked back upon his haunches, unable to veil the grin of purest pride that blossomed onto his dour features. at least one cub had made its ungainly way into the world. his child. their child.
mahler grunted beneath his breath at the sting of delighted tears behind his lilac eyes. the stirrings within the den had quieted, and he lay himself back down again. like wylla, mahler suspected there was a high possibility of only a single pup being born to them, but it mattered not.
but not long after, the gargoyle was surprised by the woman rousing once more, extending his broad muzzle toward the mouth of her shelter. another? the same warm and blessed feeling coursed through mahler; he beamed again, but the elation faded as once more the innate midwife surged to the fore, and suggested there had been no crying, no whining, none of the distressed little sounds made by newborns foisted into the cold world.
and as he had feared, a slow panic built icewater in his veins. mahler blinked. "vylla?" this was her domain now, he but a courtier to her hallowed sanctum. the eisen understood the dance of the hovering mother, his own requirements to keep his invasions saved for some days yet.
but as the moments ticked by, and nary a whimper floated from the den, mahler felt his hearing swallowed by the cadence of his own rapid heartbeat. and then, despite his instinct to avoid the well-earned slash of wylla's fangs across his face, mahler pressed closer, warily, and searched for the small bundles huddled against her side.

All Wylla wanted to do was sleep, so why couldn't Phaedra just cooperate like her brother and stop being so dramatic? Her ears were pricked for any hint of a sound from the lighter pup, but none were forthcoming. Not a wail. Not a cry. Not so much as a hiccup. Part of Wylla wanted to count her blessings and thank whatever god presided over this miserable world for giving her a quiet child. Thade was already grumbling away and Tiercel's shrieking had been a constant from the moment she dented her face on the ground, so one that didn't whine so much would be a nice change. Thankfully, her instincts were smarter than that.

She scooped Phaedra forward and spent a good deal of time slathering her tongue over the newborn's face, back and even her belly. This made no apparent difference, and by then Mahler was already lurking. Wylla's heart thumped hard in her chest as she sniffed her ailing cub, seeking any sign of pathogens or parasites, but there seemed to be nothing wrong with her besides her lungs failing. Before she could even turn and apprise Mahler of the situation, she felt his looming presence at her back and a protective surge blotted out her sensibilities.

The flash of ivory cutlery was likely all he would see before she slammed her jaws full-force into whatever part of him she could reach with a horrifying snarl, leaving Phaedra and Thade behind to coil and surge out of the den's mouth. Her yellow eyes burned with fury and fear alike. Her nostrils flared and her sides heaved as the Eisen was forced to collect herself. In the aftermath of giving birth and with such wild concern for their daughter, she couldn't feel a shred of guilt for her reaction to Mahler, and if not for Phaedra's plight she might've chased him some distance away before returning. But what remained of Wylla's conscious mind knew that if anyone could help her, Mahler could.

She turned back to the pups and plucked the paler one from the floor, turning back to Mahler and placing Phaedra gingerly between her paws. She laid herself down, still within the den to prevent the chill of the outside air from reaching her, but Phaedra was now within the midwife's reach. I don't know what's wrong with her, she breathed, trying to hide the trembling from her voice.

@Thade Feel free to hop in whenever, just wanna keep things moving!

just an interim, bc she's fully unconscious! is there a doktor in the house

if only the sheer force of a mother's desperate plea was enough; the ferocity distilled in Wylla's thimble frame alone, the instant she spun on Mahler, would have surely wrenched the girl forth from her drowning sickness.
in reality, she was cast about in the stir, and then once again her body was ragdoll without any port for her mother's storm -- no sign of life, except a pulse as faint as a spirit's sigh, only noticable to a practiced touch and dead to any other.
she would not feel herself gathered into the cradling tilde of a trembling arm. she did not feel anything, and the anchor continued its rote trawl deeper, and deeper, and deeper still.

wylla split him from the base of left eye to his chin, a series of jagged wounds that sent the man reeling backward from the den. the ragged remnant of a stifled growl flared to life in his throat, but mahler quelled it, grunting beneath his breath and sending tall ears back against his broad skull. he had expected it, after all; that made the pain no less great.
tongue lapped blood from his lip as he cast his gaze first over poor wylla, who was not destined to have peace in any endeavor, it seemed, and then fixed to the small mooncolored parcel the woman lay between her paws. she.
a daughter.
mahler swallowed. the agony of discovering his children hot with fever now swept over the man, setting his jaw with a brief tremble before he reached forward resolutely. the tension in wylla was palpable; he was as unwelcome as any father would be, but he took upon the tiny girl and lay her over the hard arch of his wrist. muzzle lowered, turned; mahler pressed his lips against her tiny chest.
"she lives, vylla," he breathed after a long, eternal moment, unable to keep the tremour from his voice this time. relief, fear. the man pulled back, readjusted their daughter's positioning, and began to nudge her with a controlled roughness along miniscule shoulderblades, hoping to provoke a cough or a squall.
his blood smeared her velveteen fur as he worked in grim silence.
there were many reasons a child ceased breath upon entry into the world. perhaps she had swallowed a piece of the caul; perhaps the waters of birth had found its way into her tiny new lungs. perhaps those themselves were ill-formed, unfit to inhale the cold brash air. 
many reasons, and mahler found a singular dark comfort in running through possible diagnoses, refusing to entertain the possibility that in this very moment, he would lose another child.
a daughter.
atme, verdammt!

skipping bruce wyllas with permission 

a galvanized scourge above her, a blood-riven face; the eye of the storm was truly the calmest place to be. 

now back to this meaning, littlest Phaedra, to puddle-jump from your start to your finish?

moments. just moments, was all it was, this time of hers spent in the nether. neither alive nor dead, just a soul clinging to the leg of its husk as the pulse still whispered under-breath. but as just moments became half another moment (time wasted; fully formed egos would always be ruiners of children) that whisper became a secret.

for the best, she was unconcerned with the chaos of triage and senseless to the compressions that might have otherwise pained her, the vigorous rubbings, anguished emotion filtering through the interstices of concentration as her father voicelessly pleaded with her lifefull-lifeless body to renegotiate with him. she was oblivious that the stormclouds of Wylla and Mahler now loomed overhead, gusting in concert, perhaps joined in paroxysms of grief and agony wrought from the callused palms of what could only work with the most honest of loves like smelted quartz and turn it into a life most certainly not meant to just shatter. 

indestructible, was it not? love borne for one's child was a love borne in quartz; it could not be destroyed, but the body itself was forged from mere glass and new souls were clumsy little things. 

in a culmination of those moments, she wasn’t entirely dreamless. while the universe reconsidered its verdict, a chaplet of gilt twine playfully wound its way ‘round her innermost self, like a strand of the thinnest possible hairs, dithering and scintillating and tickling under-chin … drawing her back into some manner of unconscious lucidity. 

as like some warmer mercy intervening on this begetter of a most cruel destiny, saying,
to her i will bare a small thread of life, and her curiosity or lack thereof will see my decision made. 

with intrigue she pursued the dancing shimmer and midst its whirling dervish a giggle burst in the privacy of her mind. in that instant, she was foisted from the anchor that sought to tow her, tempt her with the comfortable abyss like the Serpent to her falling Eve. no, it was not time. the weight lifted and she floated up with the scintillant fibril in lead, up ever so high, until something like a water’s surface broke over her face. 

then puddle-jumper she is not.

Phaedra’s sunken sides heaved and then onto the floor she spewed a watery stream, all the remaining fluid purged from her lungs by Mahler’s adept exertion. her nose welled out the same substance simultaneously. once of vital importance to her life, this sap of birth, this requirement of her living within another—not a moment longer welcome to her body. it left a small but ugly-memoried stain on the frostbitten soil beneath them.

face wet, her mouth finally cleaved and a tongue more suitably pink unfurled. she grunted, and coughed, and then trilled loudly as her lungs expanded with more freedom to do so. she laboriously worked through some breaths between cries and, exposed to the verglas lance of the breeze, her moonmade body started to tremble. her energy was still depleted, but despite that the doctor's patient trundled off her gurney Phaedra squirmed on her champion's paw and rocked off, landing upon her back between both feet that dwarfed her. feeling the soreness in her back, her tail and legs curled to her center like a poked-at pillbug.

brows formed in discontent furrowed and unfurrowed, as if in a dilemma about her present circumstances. disdaining the deep chill in her bones and the ache in her blood-mantled shoulders, and as if slowly also realizing the lack of milk in her belly, the babe bleated shrilly in his face like the ovarian delight she was.

she settled into quieter grizzling, however, and puzzlement, when she found that reaching out the mite pads of her paw connected to something wet and warm. tears, still-warm blood, or the hot breath from his nostrils, whatever it was, she pressed her foot against it and sighed.

It took almost every ounce of Wylla's fortitude to remain where she was. A soft tremor took up residence in her narrow chest and shuddered down to her ankles, which were stretched toward Mahler and the listless Phaedra almost beseechingly. She winced as she felt Thade's gums smash closed against a teat and she reacted by turning her head and aiming a silent snarl at him, though of course he could neither see nor hear it. A welcome distraction, but a brief one.

It felt like years stretched taut between them, Mahler administering some kind of... fuck it, she had no idea what he was doing. Her yellow eyes were strangely glassy as she watched, breath stoppered in her lungs, worry piercing deeper into her thorny heart than worry had any business going. She'd literally shit Tiercel out onto a rock and she'd been completely fine. How was it possible she could give birth pretty normally and have this happen?

Dread was beginning to consume her by the time Mahler's attentions worked and a trilling cry broke the silence. Wylla slammed her dark ears forward when Phaedra sucked in a breath and rolled off Mahler's paw. She wasted no time crowding forward, trying to shove her face rudely in past Mahler to inspect her baby. If he didn't do anything she was liable to snatch Phaedra back without so much as a thank you. Get the fuck outta the way, was about the best he might get in that regard.

There'd be time to make up for her rude behaviour later.

thousands of moments concentrated themself into a second that eked rust into the borders of mahler's focused calm. he began to come alive with panic, jaw tensing more tightly, though he strove equally not to show this to wylla. her tension, her horror, her fear; it laced the den with a bladelike intensity that stole evermore aptitude from mahler. it was all he could do not to glance sideways at her, to read the truth in his beloved's eyes of their loss —
a gush of fluid, a gasp, a cry; body beginning to tremble, tiny limp figure previously cooling now flushed with warmth and moving down, off, off! down between forepaws that shook with relief.
salt mingled with scarlet; mahler bent with wearied joy at her touch.
she would live.
in the next moment, wylla had come up, snatched her away, and mahler drew himself quickly from the den. he had violated the order of nature to enter her sanctum at all during this time, and felt again the stinging in his face, renewed. wincing as the cold air gnawed his wounds, the gargoyle turned away, a smile still alit upon his features as he took up his post a proper distance away.

sry was giving thade's player a chance to post before i threw in my last one! made some assumptions to close myself out

her pale toes flexed against the source of warmth and came away wet. lungs slowed in their spasming and the string of discomfort remaining in her chest lifted away like an untied balloon afloat a breath of wind, in its place a lancinating kind of discomfort settled in her gut. phaedra grew restless under the watchful gable of her gentle practitioner, mouthing at nothing and pedaling herself nowhere. 
a source of the smell that further stoked up this restlessness—sweetness, milk—drew in shortly and the girl found cries anew in her throat. snatched away again she grew still and stiff—the tenderness roosted between her shoulders flaring. once she was earthbound again and free to move sans arrest, her body relaxed at once.
after being re-washed and re-fussed over, she scooted and rooted until her mouth found a teat and latched until she was drinking every rich detail the colostrum provisioned with great zeal.
the fires of her near-tragedy burned out of her memory, windblown cinders, with the only ember remaining being that bodily ache that would also fade in due time.

Finishing up here!

She carried their fair little daughter back into the suffocating warmth of the cavern, a much more suitable den than her mouldy stump from the year prior, and placed her gently back alongside her brother. The size difference between them was remarkable. It wouldn't be long before the girl caught up to her brother in size, but perhaps it was a sign of things to come. In adolescence perhaps he would overtake his sister and his mother alike, sprouting to better match his sire. Or perhaps it would be Phaedra who outgrew her.

Grimacing at the dull ache in her abdomen, Wylla curled her body around the cubs with her hind legs splayed to the sides so they could access her belly and fell into a deep, restful sleep.