Sawtooth Spire the first time that i sought for grace

backdated to before she had spoken her first word, idk dates, yolo

late to bed, early to rise was the phaedra modus vivendi.
after @Mahler had SANK HER HEART into a frozen lake, she slept in fits and starts until daybreak. seldom did the lamb rebel against the commandments of her mother (such as "never, ever, leave the den without me or your father present"), but she felt such torment being the only one sitting awake, bored half to death, feeling secretly with a scald on her soul from yesternight. tears dewed anew in her eyes when the keepsake of it flumped unwanted in her memory, and it was then phaedra decided she wasn't going to sit around and harbour her hurt any longer. she dried her cheeks with a swipe of her wrist.
carefully extracting herself from the corner of the den, phaedra tiptoed over slumbering bodies, freezing when thade restlessly shifted positions, and made extra care not to disturb ... australia, wasn't it? snuggled against wylla's belly. glaaaare.
when the first light of dayglow haloed her crown as she stole from the den, she sighed out the tension she'd been holding in her body.
knowing her brother and australia still slept soundly within, it wasn’t them she was concerned about. casting a scrutinizing glance back into the den; her head was on a swivel as she searched the darkness for the form of her mother. she didn’t need to see her though—a snuffling snore reached her ears, a sound like a congested rhino unique to wylla’s coma-like sleeps. she wouldn't wake for another hour yet, phaedra was sure of it.
with one last wry look cast at her milk-burglar, she perked up with mischief and eagerness and a tummyful of nervousness for good measure. without time to spare she sprang off her haunches and stepped lively towards her garden and fairy circle (with those apparent dEaDlY muchflooms), nose to the ground in search of the frog she’d met the evening before. 
she paused and hummed to herself. thinking back. it came to her; it'd gone through the ferns by the rock just at the base of their peach tree. she loped up to the tree, and hesitated for a brief moment, as if confabbing with the devil on her shoulder, before shouldering through the broadleaf and gorse. don’t go past the cloudberry bushes her mind whispered with guilt. another commandment. well, to her credit, she hadn’t seen any bushes growing clouds, only berries! maybe her mother meant don't go past bushes after it rained? were the cloudberries rain? what a convoluted way of wording that rule. besides, it hadn't rained last night, so all bushes were fair game, then.
it stood up in court. perhaps not wylla’s court, but definitely in the court of technicalities, which was much more official and pardonable when it came to the whims of diablerie (she was sure of this also).  
looking around, her eyes wayfared the new sights around her. usually papa or mama were with her on these excursions, and they’d never taken her down this footpath, which pulsated trepidation hot behind her ears. lots of green stuff. the frog was green. this would be a very difficult pursuit. burying her qualms, she pushed through all-things-vert. 
as noises crinkled and snapped around her, her ears splayed, and another vein of fear opened in her mind, manifesting all sorts of imaginative bogymen. she was about to turn back around and abandon her quest when she heard roo-roo-room. she gasped with a softly mischievous titter and the fear of her surroundings was momentarily staunched by the discovery of a creek sown with moss and boulders and honeyed sunlight. the frog’s call was answered by more melodies of his kind, and crickets, and other insect chirrupings she couldn’t identify.
this puptopia was only one ... two ... three ...about three hundred steps, by her reliable estimate, from her den, and her parents had never brought her here? it was so beautiful, and the water!; she and thade and australia she supposed would have so much fun here! why had they kept it hidden from their bairns’ eyes? she felt almost sour for its secrecy. 
but the mäuschen didn’t have an adult’s awareness of the world, never mind an awareness of the dangers a creek like this posed to a girl in the springtime of life. her mind didn’t parse her actions as reckless, let alone detrimental to her wellbeing—all she knew was that she had a frog gentleman to find.
wading and splashing around the shallow puddles, midst her glee she glanced down and caught the mirror image of herself reflecting back in the slow undulations of the water. she cocked her head, eyes opening wide with surprise when the girl  in the water mimicked her perfectly. she was persuaded to plunge her face into the cold water to enter the new realm she was certain existed, when—
roo-roo-room phaedra jerked her head up, bestrewing water as she spun about, looking to and fro before finally pinning her gaze on an amphibian sitting monk-like on a rock across the wide yawning of creek.
the cub paced back and forth, wanting oh-so-dearly to go meet the frog and his wife and maybe even their children! they would have plenty of sun-upness to play in, papa frog wouldn't be such a sourpuss to her, and most importantly nobody would force her to sleep next to dumb boys who kicked her in their sleep because all of the frog's children were girls like her. she just knew it. she'd yarned a perfect life for herself in her head, spinning it around and around all the hurts inside until life was a fairytale, not a drama.  
still, she didn’t how to get to the frog's home across the water. up to her toes was the deepest she’d ever been in water, now she was wrist deep, and its lick was still more of bite even though wintertime had flown.
phaedra’s eyes sought a workable course of action ... 
the rocks! pleased with her cleverness, she clumsily shinnied up the first rock, its tabletop pleasantly warm and dry. simplicity itself. with a grunt she leapt to the next piece of stonework, then the next, each stone growing smaller under the pads of her feet until cool water streamed over her toes. phaedra looked behind her and thought with uneasiness pretzeling in her guts how much harder it would be to jump high than low to get herself back to the side that took her home. 
determined, she faced her next move, shivering from the cold sluicing over her feet. summoning a resolute breath and sucking it into to the sea of her doubt, she stooped and pounced towards the next plinth.
a grunt barged into her chest. she hadn’t anticipated how slippery this one would be, nor did she consider that the round boulders would be the hardest to negotiate with. bitter dread chilled her bones as she tried to hoist herself up and couldn’t. her hind-legs sculled desperately, claws scrabbling against the schist.  
in the next heartbeat her wan strength surrendered her to the water.
though this stream had chasmic, fast-moving pockets of water that would have drowned her in mere seconds, by the devil's own luck, phaedra had fallen into water that was only elbow depth for any adult.
even so, she was small for her age, and had never swam before, so panic seized her like a sunflash, swift. ”b-bab-aaa! mma—mmffrgl—” she despairingly cried as her throat burbled with water.
her voice, like her, was so minikin she knew the ransom for her life would never reach her pleaded rescuers, so she had to rescue herself. her nose sputtered with water (an uncomfortably familiar sensation; the echo within the echo of an echo of a memory lost forever to her conscious, but humming behind her ears), natheless she forced herself to calm down and extend with her backlegs. she could only just touch the silty bottom with her toes and then, instinct urged her forelegs to
tread tread tread
carrying her with some resistence on the water for what felt like a lifetime until she could raise herself up with trembling legs and schlepp her body upon a sunbaked slab of granite. dripping wet, she shuddered violently with adrenaline and fear, mouth panting from the effort of swimming. the anchor of fatigue pulled her into a heap on the stone.
swimming. she’d swam. all by herself, she realized. she rescued herself (from rather shallow water, but the fact remained ...)! in the rubble of dismay sitting in her stomach, a little jewel, a ruby of dignity, glistered. she’d have grinned to herself were she not so laden with exhaustion.
roo-roo-roo- she heard him somewhere, but instead of following that siren song, the drowned lamb made origami of herself and rested against the rock, surrounded by that treacherous water.
sun warm on her back, she fluttered her lashes sleepily until her eyes closed her to the world.

guilt over the rebellion in phaedra quelled by yours truly haunted mahler, and in the days that followed, he was saddled with the detrimental conception that he had somehow ruined his little daughter. such thoughts filled the gargoyle with a marrow-felt disheartening, and he proceeded to embark upon a detailed tour of his greatest failures in the interim between the clash of teeth and rediscovering his zuckermaus.
and always, always did the coursing of his innermost perusal lead him back to marigold. how would she feel to see him now, without a wife but father to a pair of whelps all the same, with more soon to unfurl with first breath? his life now was not what mahler had expected it to be, but there was no regret in him when it came to thoughts of the chosen path.
a shuddering breath. he did not speak of marigold with wylla, nor with nyx. the gold of her memories was locked back in the depths of his throat, surfacing only in the splintered wood of his voice when he simply must mention her. but now the musiker was alone, seeking through some streambed for watersmoothed pebbles he might bring back to thade, and here a stick of apple blossoms, broken carefully from their bobbing branch with a deft nip of teeth upheld as mahler balanced heavily, foolishly, upon hinds in the sprawl of forest that climbed the rocky shelves of sagtannet.
little phaedra. mahler followed the lap of the waters along its trail, pausing from time to time and supping of its surface during a pause. his mind, freed to wander where it might along the long dust-flecked halls of memory, took a circuitous route back to marigold, but this time what he recalled of her face was now blurred 'round with a detailing that had come dove-grey in nature, silvered, yellow-eyed.
a chirping somewhere in the distance, the nearby chirrup of birds sleepily cooing to one another the nature of the predator beneath their darkened branches. his family lay abed and mahler had the greenveldt staircases of his land to wander. he had not dipped below the foothills hardly once since diaspora and courtfall had settled together; the exhausted nights wrought in parents by the early days and months had given way to a sort of grudging insomnia.
it was cloaked in this half-awareness that mahler trudged through the wild country that he and wylla and wintersbane had chosen and held these past months. not even a year, nor six passings of the moon — but it certainly seemed quite longer with how closely they had collected their packlands into one.
pacing alongside the waterway, mahler took himself back in the direction of the quiet den, and would have stepped out into the clearer places to seek a lie-down spot, had not the tendril of phaedra's live pathmarks come to him. tail lashed at his hocks, and with a low sigh, mahler chuckled to himself and wheeled about to seek after his recalcitrant spawn.
whatever amusement mahler may have held for the moment swiftly fled as the stream roughened into choppier harshness. it was with fair ease that mahler traversed, but he was grimly aware that such a deluge would be as windholme for the child. a cough beneath his breath as heavy legs churned onward, and onward.
phaedra.
the man's air caught in his throat. he refused to succumb to panic, but as the waters widened and yawned into deeper pools, mahler's gaze grew hard with dread, a purple hue to the fatherly grief that he anticipated, and horror tightened his throat. he splashed alongside the thickening ribbon of rushing currents, leapt in a bound a thinner place, and 
phaedra.
limbs grew loose with relief, and the beginnings of terror smarted into tears behind the gargoyle's eyelids. pale child lying amid the waters, dampened; mahler read the message of what had happened and waded into the stream. far too deep for her. far too dangerous — he cursed himself and leant dripping over the paperdraped figure of his tiny child as he sought her breath and murmured her name.

listened 2 this while writing

a plink of water upon her nose stirred the evermore-drowning child from her toilworn drowse. the murmur of her name woke her.
she lifted her head gently, heedless of her body’s want to lie still longer yet, blinking all gluey-lids and somnolence to regard the source of the shadow cast over her.
papa.
had he come to skewer her on his teeth for this piece de resistance disobedience? had she in some way manifested him from the fire and brimstone of inmost brokenheartedness? or had he most simply heard her choked misereres and bid her rescue?
no, he had not come to rescue her—not in time. she’d been able to do that on her own, and phaedra impressed that quiet dignity to her heart to try and replace the unplumbed depths of vulnerability and all her failings to interpret the importance of its presence.
it seemed her legs ached more upon awakening than after she'd dragged herself from the waters. when she strove to stand, they juddered and folded back under her as though she were a newly born fawn. she collapsed on herself with a shrill grunt and yip.
the eyes that had always been warm in their glances on mahler were frore now, and she turned her cheek away from him, withheld tears from the fear and panic she’d experienced struggling in that creek retting her eyes. 
”b—ba—" the second half of bad died in the back of her throat and she could not revive it. 
”phhhhh—ph … ph ..." but the name shattered in her mouth, sharp and cruel as glass. she wept inconsolably into her gathered legs. 
why was it so hard to do what came so easily to grown-ups? 
her tongue felt like a heavy stone in her mouth. she wanted to say words but they rattled in her mouth like broken teeth, or tumbled off the page like strewn dust after a sneeze.
the rabbitsoft summit of her shoulderblades quaked with a sob. 
if she truly cried as a result of fear, or if it was scooped from a deeper well of feeling ...
there was no answer for that.

i danced to that :O love him

phaedra's historically loving gaze lashed at him like a viperstrike. mahler's limbs stiffened with surprise, for she had never regarded him so before. jaws parted but closed with the awareness of futility; as she sobbed, the gargoyle found he could not form words that might gentle the duress of her heartward turbulence.
"du bist ein sehr starkes mädchen. das ist gut," the stricken father began with a great unsurety propelled only by his insistence that phaedra know he was attempting to understand her small and detailed machinations.
"es ist gut, dass du so viele dinge fühlst." a pause, feeling as though he had only repeated himself; mahler reached out to press a downylight nudge against her shuddering shoulder, if the child did not pull away.
a clutch in his throat. the gargoyle raised his broad head and looked down upon his sorrow-scoured fledgling. "und ich möchte sie hören." a clumsy end, the words marching off his tongue like scuddering droplets of water, but mahler was nevertheless wholeheld by his need to explain his listening ear.

15 lashings for 15 days of neglect but make it sexy

a daughter that was usually like putty in her father’s hands was presently a work of pottery, kiln-hot and gimcrack; destroyable without careful handling (preferably with kevlar gloves or tongs). she sniffled, fierce scathe still turned from him as he spoke in their secret language. strong, good, he impressed upon her, though at the moment she felt physically weak and couldn’t see how she was any stronger than a wet leaf. he meant mentally, a thing she could not comprehend, and stared hard at her legs, concentrating on each plip-plop of the tears wetting them. 
being good was another matter. he reiterated good as a thing fully realized, as though to emphasize it as the axiom that her mind would refer to when she reflected on herself, on the weight of her worth. she was inspirited by it—stood up wobbling and whirled on him, catching herself with a gasp as her foot slipped off the jagged lip of the stone.
her heart and stomach both flipped in anticipative dread of the water.
she stomped up on her father, squaring up with him tbh, despite her doddery legs, jerking her shoulder away from his nudge as all the frustration rallying in her body flushed out a firm ”SCHECHD!” in rejection of all he had assured and wanted of her.
her feelings were bad because they felt that way when she experienced them. 
nonetheless, despite her harshness towards him, and despite all her dopey child emoting (daughters, amirite?), in the end he was her papa and there and his child suddenly felt an immediate need for comforting, for all the things she did feel were so much like a very big deal to her, and her earlier dunk also agreed upon its necessity.
eyebrows still bearing down her frown, she rushed into him and pressed her face into his chest, ensconcing herself into the only place that could possibly ever feel safe in that present moment.

only 4 u

she shouted, and his heart hurt; she shouted, and he felt the edges of himself untangle. poor phaedra, poor piping fierce girl. he held her close, lifting a broad arm to keep her tight against his heart. she had the fiery nature of wylla but his tongue; the cool ways of her mother and the vying mind of her father. she was an amalgamation of the things he saw in himself and that which he loved in the woman he had kept in his soul since grimnismal.
how could he then argue with the way that phaedra felt, even clumsily articulated? he could not. mahler lowered his muzzle to kiss her small crown, allowed her forehead its rest in the wide spread of chestfur for as long as she wished. "willst du jetzt nach hause gehen, zuckermaus?" the shadowpriest rumbled in his baritone.
back to thade and mama, back to where perhaps things were good rather than bad. mahler fretted that she would never move beyond this moment, that forever she would remember it; he was determined that she see the sweetness of it also in a look-back, and so regardless of what she said in response, mahler held his tiny daughter and was still.

bestill my beating heart

she was content to nuzzle her tear-streaked face against his calm and soft chest, the glower marionetting her brow clipping its strings until her face relaxed into a consoled, misty-eyed smile when he laid a kiss upon her pale diadem. mahler would just have to fib to wylla and tell her phaedra's first word had been "mama", instead of the poignant truth—bad—smithed into a language wrought more easily by her tongue.
"ängsdlich ..." she informed him just above a whisper, burrowing her muzzle further into his chest as her mind cast back to the troubled waters, the cold glaciating her bones as she was overcome with water ... she cried out suddenly, and tried to estrange herself from the memory and focus on her blaze of glory. by hap and circumstance she'd survived; a favorable outcome this time, but she should have drowned that day. by all accounts mahler should have found his daughter's debouched corpse lain by the streamside.  
it could be that there was another soul looking out for her. and she didn't know what awakend such imaginings within her, but it would do her good to perish such silly thoughts. she had mastered her fear, phaedra had won back her life fair and square without the intervention of anything except her own inchoate instincts growing in with her adult teeth. 
cloven to one another, her papa's leg swept around her hindquarters to draw her closer to his heart. she pressed her ear against it and was soothed by its verse. time without end passed. then, the rumble of his voice insinuated it was time to go home. without demand, but its softer manner of implication. phaedra looked through the canopy of the trees; it was late morning, she could tell by the sun. mother, thade, and ... the other one would all be up and about by now.
reluctantly she pulled away from mahler's embrace and felt the warm granite on the pads of her feet. her eyes cut to the water and fear thrust its shiv into her chest. she looked anxiously back to her father; too old to be comfortably scruffed and carried, she would need to ford the calmer side of the creek alongside mahler in order to reach the boulder-strewn port that led back home. 
a proper lesson in swimming, then.
wading, in sooth, but it was all the same to her. 
phaedra bumped her crown against mahler's chest once again, eyes squeezed shut. please don't let me go, her heart pounded in her ears.

too belatedly mahler realized sched and now ängsdlich and it dawned finally upon him like an anchor to the descent of his own murky depths. "oh, phaedra," he muttered tearfully, the current breaking around his rockbit legs. brave child, brave mouse; mahler by turns grasped her nape or nudged her in efforts to keep a straight trajectory to the opposite bank.
grown much, and yet he gripped the girl and brought her firmly to the solidity of ground, pausing alongside phaedra with a relieved grunt before he stepped aside to shake out his thick pelt. he scarcely let her from his gaze; poor sodden baby thing. mahler swallowed the tremulo of tears in his throat and put his crown down to brush hers with an exhale.
"du bist nicht schlecht. sie sind mutig. du bist gut," he repeated halfway in a flurry of feeling. and i do not want to lose you. not now. not ever.

she resisted his attempts to get her into the water at first, tearfully backing until her feet were balancing on the far end of the granite platform, moonkisst frame straddling stone as her profusely shed tears plopped against it.
when her tail drooped off the edge and she felt its tip graze the water from which she had recently emerged, she was set astir with the black oil of dread in her stomach and locomoted forward to hesitate on his end of the ledge. encouraged gently by her father, impulsivity bade her clumsy plunk into the shallows. she puled as fear's steeple made an easy pincushion of her, the whites of her eyes showing when her nose occasionally took on some water. mahler had waded patiently alongside his daughter, giving her directive nudges and scruffing her tenderly to help her along when she struggled. her tail streamed across the surface like a sinuous serpent, and she found it easier to steer with.
once they were at last within a stone's throw of the bank, and her legs were so tired and aching they felt like separate entities from her body, she began a distich of bawling with desperation and relief. mahler then grasped her and pulled her to shore, at last on solid ground, hallowed ground upon which her legs gave out from under her.
her father withheld his tears, but she felt new, brak wetness dampen her as he listed his muzzle to nestle her crown. she reflexively nuzzled up into the comfort, using the last of her strength to wrap both forelegs firmly around the ashlar legs of her papabär, clinging fast to him with her eyes cinched shut.
she addressed herself solely to the sound of his voice, his intoning words of her merit with such reverent sentiment that she could do naught but believe him. "moodicg," she whispered, trembling, "p..aah." she burrowed her face into the sinewed length of his leg, her shoulders shaking from the adrenaline and sobs that wouldn't stop coming in waves like those against her face when she had been in the water. 
with legs so fatigued, she regardless tried to stand and hobbled a few steps before collapsing at his feet like an almsgirl begging for absolution, lifting her glassy blues to gaze helplessly at him. 

phaedra embraced him, cried, and began to answer the call of her wild heart to hearken him. but her burdened young self could travel no further. he considered calling for wylla, but surely she slept; surely their daughter was safe now, and he would not frenzy the heart of another being.
perhaps in meanwell he had committed another mistake of arrogance, but it was soon gone out of his head. he paced forward, lay down right upon the bank, and gathered her sodden little frame close. there was safety here; he knew the shadows and places of sagtannet, and felt the horrid hand of welting exhaustion move upon himself as well.
a slumber, after which he would take her back, but for now mahler only wanted to assure himself that she was here and solid and warm with breath, that this was no nightmare from which he might suddenly wake with a dead child.

archive after one more from you? pp getting phaedra home, or u can archive here, ur call mi amour

shuddering, sprawled across the water's edge, involuntary grizzles of fear juddered from her throat like hiccups. again, a newborn lamb on fresh legs, she attempted to stand and carry forth—but her legs twisted together and she folded on her knees with laboring breaths. a small cough, followed by a thin stream of water that had made its way to her lungs, expectorated into the rocks, followed by a minikin sneeze that sounded more like a faerie's shriek than anything else.
suddenly, phaedra was collected into the cairnlike arms of her papa and felt the dry warmth of his chest swaddle her. she pressed against him, velcroed, and curled into a ball until the shuddering ceased and his warmth sent her into a dreamless, deep sleep.

unfortunately, this would be the last of her respite when it came to sleep—the memory of the water and its gulping mouth would menace her for months to come.

says calliope <3

suddenly consumed with the horrid, headstrong idea that she might be lost, mahler remained as he was, phaedra forming a comma within the parentheses of his hard-built legs. how curious, his fatherly love; to have it unmake him both in rage and in softness; several times he dipped his muzzle to see that she continued to breathe; his lilac eyes closed only for minutes at a time, until just before dawn, he woke the child and guided her home to the den, settling phaedra upon the precipice of an event that, yet unknown to him, would reverberate havoc in the months to come.