Sawtooth Spire when everything was broken, the devil hit his second stride

she was kicking violently in her sleep, paddling her feet, mumbling mama and papa in tiny, incomplete wisps of breath.

she could see the water speaking. some sibylline dialogue occurring that was bereft of spoken language; images of things the water was passing, feeling, hearing, rumors in its whitewater. not words in her ears, rather, nanosecond snapshots flashing too fast for her to keep up with: salmon, fossil, blood, body, horse, silt, bottlecap ...

her eyes rolled behind paperthin lids, lashes fluttering rapidly. 
 
she was in the water, in that idyllic, terrible backwater, treading like before but making no progress for the plinth upon which mahler had found her. she existed to dread this moment forever.
atop that plinth, fronting prisms of light, were mirages that at first waxed in and out of sight from the interference of water speak.
she tried to clear her vision through blinking, to subdue the water's bruit. when that didn't work, she squeezed her eyes shut, salmon, char, bone, fox, rock, and began to concentrate on the visualization of herself intoning "see, see, see, see, see!" 
the water images were instantly behind chiffon,

she let out a sigh.

when she re-opened her eyes, she saw the figures standing on the granite, staring vacantly down at her. mama was there with thade, astraeus, with stag ... then there was papa, standing at the fore with two nondescript cubs at his feet, their faces transforming from nebulose to what she saw when she looked into the water: the purled reflection of herself, though she did not know that's what it was. "leave me alone!" she tried to yell, but instead coughed up dandelion pappus that blustered into their faces, scrambling them again into nebulosity.  
"papa! gedmeout the wader! i'ms in the wader!" she gasped. his face was severe, exasperated. "papa ple-please! ich bin ängsdlich!" and with a shimmery, disappointed shake of his head, he cast his eyes down to the two children at his feet and smiled with great pride, turning away with them until the sunlight swallowed their forms.
she heard a mighty crack of the plinth fragmenting.
she looked to thade and astraeus. astraeus' face contorted into something ophidian and not of their world, something nether. he, as well, turned and devotedly followed mahler into the effulgent mouth with a satisfied look describing his countenance. 
thade stepped up, his face beamed brightly as he crooned her name encouragingly, "you got this, phae, c'mon, ya just godda-" his leg reaching into the water, she reached back ... 

"thadey," phaedra murmured, breaking into a cold sweat. she spasmodically kicked her foreleg out.

before their paws could touch, he vanished into thin air. a piece of the platform broke off with another loud crack.

the water was becoming more insistent, now. she looked to stag and her eyes pleaded with his, but the apathetic expression on his face began to scintillate too. "sdag, i need you, i need yow help! hilf mir, redde mich!", and before turning away from her to walk with the rest, he flatly spoke, not in his own voice, but in that of her father's: "tut mir leid, wenig liebe, das haben sie mir nie beigebracht." and he was swallowed down the throat of light.
a thunder crack. the granite was holding only wylla now. she realised with agony there was no room for her upon the stonework at all. 
mama. phaedra whimpered in and out of her dreamscape. "mama—" her ears were underwater now. though her mother's eyes were empty, she could see her smile warmly and mouth something ... but she could not hear her! "i ... the wa— mama, i can'd— i cannod hear you!" she gasped, and closed her eyes tightly and demanded in the deepest wells of thought: let me hear her! 
when she opened her eyes, her mother's legs were evanescing into the dust motes that danced in pylons of sunlight. she looked up before her mother could turn away from her too, and heard her speak, words from a smiling mouth that could not have been crueler to ears fraught with the vestiges of hope: "you're making things hard, baby. please stop fighting it, you are not strong enough, phaedra. it's better this way." and then she, too, was gone. the pedestal collapsed into the water, leaving her moorless. 
the sunlight evaporated, and all that was left was now a sea of tumultous black water.

devastated, phaedra stopped fighting and felt her body sink into complete oblivion.

"I'MS S-S-SORRY!" she burst awake with a screaming sob. felt the warm trickle under her thighs, seep across the masonry. she lifted her hindleg and looked—why was it that color? her urine was like pure amber. sweat irritated the pads of her feet, the sensation of sitting in a sauna overcoming her. she panted to too great an extent to remain where she was and tucked her tail under her belly as she departed from wylla's (probably startled awake) side to feel the cool breeze outside rake its nails through her fur and calm her trembling limbs. 
she swayed on her feet, feeling qualmish and dehydrated. her gums frothed. how long had it been since she'd last drank? she wasn't thinking of these things. her body was putting out water faster than she could quaff it and now the heat syncope was overbearing; phaedra looked to the sky as her head began to swim, watching as the stars began whirling fast and the sound of static filled her ears. "m-aa- i don' feel ..." was all the child could rasp before her weight buckled under tremulous legs as she blacked out.

Wylla slept deeply and dreamlessly, but one black ear fluttered when Phaedra whimpered mama, drawing her consciousness near to the surface. But until Phaedra startled awake with a shriek, Wylla didn't stir; and when Phaedra sobbed into the dark of night, Wylla was shaken awake first by irritation (what the eff, man, again?), and then dread. The stench of urine was much stronger than normal, and when Wylla's eyes managed to focus, the ground and her pale belly were both stained a darker colour than she thought was possible.

Phaedra? she murmured, drawing herself to her paws with an exasperated sigh. The pale girl stood nearby with her fur illuminated under the moonlight. It's okay, baby, she cooed, willing away the irritation that threatened to spill through her tone. The last thing she'd ever bargained for was a bed-wetting three month old, and waking up wet with urine was quickly getting old. But she couldn't allow her fragile daughter to sense her frustration—it wasn't her fault. Thade was gone. Papa wasn't around like he once was. And Wylla, day by day, felt more and more like a failure of a mother.

Like she had with Tiercel, but at least her fiery fights with Tiercel had made her feel justified. This... this just made her feel incompetent.

Come back to b— she began, but then Phaedra muttered something and collapsed. Wylla's words were sucked back in on a sharp intake of breath; she reached her daughter's side without realizing that she'd moved at all. Phaedra! she fretted, frantically nosing her daughter's still figure. Phaedra! Baby, baby, wake up, please wake up! She didn't know what else to do besides dragging her tongue roughly over the girl's face, fighting back waves of panic that made her throat burn with an impending sob. She was no medic. She didn't know the first thing about healing. The colour and pungent odour of Phaedra's urine gave her some clue as to the cause of this, but Wylla was incapable of calmly assessing and knowing to try to carry her daughter to the water; instead, she panicked and focused solely on trying to wake Phaedra up.

nothingness.


then, dim restoration of hearing in staccato dreaminess.


"p h a edra!

b a by ,

 
b ab y, wa ke   

p h aed ra

please!"

her lids cracked into slits, then squinted to try and focus on the doubled, wavering vision of her mother hovering over her and nosing her with an air of desperation she could sense crowding into the atmosphere. "mmm .. ama ... s?" she said woozily, confused; the air felt so heavy with languor and her voice sounded parched from the dryness of her tongue. she smacked the roof of her mouth, but no saliva was there to wet it enough for her to swallow. she gulped thickly, which only made her mouth more dry.
"wha-wha- hhhap- ... m-owhf fow-thy." fuzzy, she meant to communicate. when she spoke, her flews rolled in on grey looking gums and stuck in the expression of a grimace.

She's dead she's dead she's dead—

A more reasonable wolf would've investigated for signs to the contrary, but Wylla was already sinking into a miasma of grief by the time Phaedra stirred. It made her hiccup quite suddenly when her daughter croaked out an acknowledgement, and Wylla was very much the picture of Hollywood relief when she gasped and tears sprang into her eyes.

Baby, it's okay, it's okay, she crooned, seeking to shush Phaedra's stilted attempts at talking. She wasn't able to make the words out, anyway. She'd never been very good at that. The girl's impediment was forcing Wylla to become a better listener, but not when it was further hampered by cottonmouth. You fell down, but you're okay now.

A quick snuffle along the girl's belly, the sour and overly pungent scent of urine. Wylla grimaced. Now that Phaedra was awake, she was able to flip back through the mother's handbook in her head—devoid of several important chapters, I'm afraid—and suggested, let's go get you some water. Can you stand up?

the black, rheumy rims of her eyes blinked out tears that sank into the fur of her cheek. phaedra smacked her drouthy mouth, tongue feeling about her bone dry teeth. she rocked upright from her shoulder, using the tilde of her leg to support the sway in her body. "i feh dow," the child parroted her mother, looking searchingly at wylla's panicked face. "making thingth h-hard," she remembered from her dream, squinching her brows and turning her face to stare away towards nothing.
when her mother suggested she get to the water, phaedra's chest burned like a furnace. "wather?" she said confusedly, "no wather, no wather, no wather!" she panicked, "you ... papa leth me go. no wather!" she wobbled to her feet and then collapsed into the legs of her mother before trying again to pick herself up, all the skin of her scruff pinching from a lack of moisture.
"nod sthong enouth," she rasped, excessively panting.

Watching Phaedra stumble around like a drunken newborn filly might've been funny on another day, but tonight it filled Wylla with black dread that something was terribly wrong with her pup. It clawed up her throat, shrieking static into her ears, and for a long moment she was unable to do or say anything. Her yellow gaze tracked her fumbling daughter into the girl slammed into her legs, physically shaking her from her reverie.

Making things hard? What are you talking about, baby? she asked softly, pinching her brows together as she tried to recall if she'd ever said something like that. Or maybe Phaedra just meant that falling down had made things difficult? She did seem extremely uncoordinated, but no doubt that was just part of the whole picture. Heaven help her if Phaedra had actually injured herself somehow...

She nervously licked her nose and philtrum when the girl began panicking. No, no, just a little water! Just some water to drink! Phaedra had to drink. Wylla couldn't bear to think what might happen if she didn't. Papa would never let you go! I'll never let you go! She had no clue what she was reassuring Phaedra about, or where the mentions of strength came from, but obviously something was terribly wrong. Wylla would say anything at all if it meant soothing Phaedra's worries.

she felt so weak, her head swam when she tried to get proper footing beneath her. she couldn't hear her mother's questions, her voice was mere a faraway echo overwhelmed by the tinnitus in her ears that had her so prostrated she began toing and froing on her scalding pads in her effort to walk. 

it felt like her tongue had swollen in her throat like a bullfrog and her voice had disappeared into its mouth. "no wather," she croaked, listless.
the static roared leonine in her ears 

louder

 

louder

 

louder

phaedra came to again, legs having given out from under her a few feet from her mother who would most assuredly be at her side the instant she fell.
she gazed dazedly around, finding her eyes double visioned on the moon. "fee mooooon? sinhth when," she said, then turned her eyes searchingly for her mama, who was also in triplicity, "mama god brotherth ...?" of course, she'd never heard the word sister before, so she could only assume that what she was seeing was her mother and her mother's two "brothers" suddenly adjoining her.
she swayed uneasily in place. "dongue feeth funny, froat frogth," she mumbled before faceplanting the dirt.

Wylla frantically considered every possibility for Phaedra’s behaviour. She’d never known this level of dehydration before. This was like the salt sickness that afflicted those who drank from the ocean, but she couldn’t remember any salt water in the mountains. Unless–

Her train of thought went off the rails when Phaedra fell again. She was at her daughter’s side in an instant. Thankfully, the girl came to pretty quickly, muttering nonsense that made Wylla frown. How the hell did she know about her brothers?

I have two brothers, she said slowly. Was Phaedra seeing them on the other side of mortality’s veil? That thought was far too spooky for her tastes. She shuddered. Had. She might’ve told Phaedra a little about Ingram and Lycaon then, but her daughter’s condition was far too perilous. Maybe some other time. Baby, wait right here, okay? I’ll be right back. She tore herself from her pup’s side and sprinted into the trees where she knew moss still grew abundantly.

She returned minutes later with a green bundle in her jaws, soaked so heavily with water that it dribbled between her teeth. Please, Phaedra, she implored, offering the moss to her daughter, drink.

she didn't need much convincing to stay put. once wylla had parted her side for the morass, phaedra slumped onto her belly and draped her chin over her clammy, perspiring pawpads. her eyelids menaced her focus on the conscious realm, anchored by the ballast of hypohydration.
"mama, do n  le a m eee" she called out, tone etiolated, for nought except the dirt she mouthed at feebly.
wylla returned without delay, clutching watered moss that dribbled off her chin and plinked against phaedra's nose.
"please," the girl shook her head furiously, "drink," a heartsickening sob reamed out from her chest, shoulders shuddering.
unbeknownst to wylla, her daughter had deprived herself of water for nearly an entire week, and the amber water she made in her sleep was the reserves of her body's last.

it was ironic. as a toddler to well-nigh drown in the water, and as a child, to well-nigh die for the lack of it.

please stop fighting it, mother's dreamvoice breathed against her ear.

the princess's breath soughed out helpless and wistful. unclenching misted eyes, she lipped at the viridian clump bidden for her mouth, allowing at first only cool dribbles to fall against her tongue.
she smacked her chops, and answered her body's urgency by allowing a full sup to be culverted down her yearning throat. the taste was earthborn and faintly familiar. "mehr" she insisted in spite of herself, too muzzy to realize which language her tongue laboured with.

Silence stretched taut between them. While Phaedra scrambled past demons in her own mind, Wylla futilely tried to imagine what thoughts might be tumbling through her daughter’s head. She could only scrape the surface of Phaedra’s torment and emotional trauma. Having grown up entirely without a father, she thought she understood, but Tachyon’s total absence was infinitely better than Phaedra losing time with her papa in broad sight of him. She couldn’t possibly know how that felt.

Eventually, Phaedra began to surrender to her body’s needs. Relief washed warm through Wylla’s heart when the girl suckled water from the laden moss, then requested more. She failed to even notice the difference in tongues. She complied at once, leaving Phaedra with the first moss ball while she fetched another.

This went on for a time while Phaedra began to recover, Wylla playing porter for every request her daughter made. When she seemed more stabilized, Wylla helped her back to bed, and resolved in the morning to be a better mother to her sun-spun child. She would watch more closely for signs of neglected needs, be more attentive to the silent signals Phaedra gave, and try to be the best parent she could be. She would fail, but she owed it to her daughter to at least try.