Mudminnow River If I ever were to lose you, I'd surely lose myself.

Ciri's time on Sawtooth was as brief as any spent elsewhere along the way. After resting for a short while, she turned away with ease - despite the attachment felt, there was nothing to ground her there. After succumbing to the weight of her grief, the swallow gathered herself and carried on.

She descended into the valley quietly. Her leg muscles burned in demand for respite and her already skinny frame continued to thin, but on and on she went.

The swallow nosed a distinct aroma of claim along the way, but the scent carried on the winds did not belong to her father. Ciri wondered, fleetingly, if it'd been so long that she'd forgotten how he smelled.

Her focus was set firmly on the search for @Mahler, but she paused briefly at the edge of an unfamiliar waterway. The sun had begun to set at her back and night would soon creep in. She stepped forward carefully across the pebbles until water almost reached her dark elbows, its chill a relief to her aching paws, and she dipped her muzzle to lap at the surface.

when he left the duskfire leader, mahler carried the bundle of venison, east, again, in the direction of the cuesta. it was sundown now, and he knew that he could not be away from rivenwood this night, or any other.
the earthen river was ahead, a waterway filled with fine sand and polished stones. not preferable to the man, who had become spoilt and accustomed to the clear waters flowing within noctisardor.
he meant to cross its shining surface, but felt himself weaken into a coughing fit upon the bank. annoyed at the treacherous nature of his body, how such ugly ailments could not be thrown off, mahler turned and began to search for a path ahead.
and yet, he found himself stilled; he found himself caught in shock and incomprehension, as some feet away he took in the sight of a girl grown half to woman, wearing the eyes of nyx.
"ciri?"
but she had died in the snowfall.
mahler was helpless, staring.

She'd heard the dry cough of another, but did not care for its source. Ciri continued to satisfy her thirst and regarded it with only the cant of an ebony ear.

Her tongue slipped between dark lips to sweep the water droplets from her chin, and she gazed silently across the river toward her next destination. She didn't think the current looked powerful, but she didn't feel particularly strong. The less swimming she had to do, the better.

It'd be safer to wait until morning, but Ciri was impatient despite her weariness. She lifted her head and returned to the riverbank, where she roughly shook out her furs and began to pick her way along the pebbles again in search for a safer crossing.

A voice, however, stopped her in her tracks. Suddenly alert, the swallow's sharp gaze found the dark face and frosted eyes of- 

"Papa?"

it was her. mahler gaped dumbly, and then his muscular legs began to churn, carrying him swiftly to ciri — ciri, he could scarcely believe it — until he stood before his daughter and inhaled a breath that hurt him all the way through.
"i knew — i vas told you had died in the snow. vith your mother," voice distant and bittered and desperately wishing to warm to the living vision of her. but the appearance of cirilla only confronted mahler with the new and horrid regrets, that he had given his daughters up, that he had been cruel in devoting himself again to rivenwood, that he had failed all he loved once more in this moment.
"you vere gone, and then moonspear vas destroyed. elke —" tones sharp and trailing. mahler found himself silent. how had she found him? how had she come back? "vhere did you go?"

No sooner had the syllables tumbled from her maw did the gargoyle sweep forward. Ciri moved toward him, an eagerness in her to close the distance between them and fit herself against him, but her father stopped short.

Her travel-worn muscles tightened. Her heart skipped a beat - painfully aware of how he did not reach for her.

Ciri had longed for this day. She'd spent that lonely time between wakefulness and slumber longing for a happy reunion, to be welcomed, to feel wanted. Her father was, after all, the only thing she had left in the world that mattered.

Instead of warmth and affection, of excitement to see her risen from the dead, Cirilla was instead met with what he thought - what others had told him. Her thoughts turned briefly to the father she'd met in the woods, to his desperate search for his own young daughter - unwillingness in him to consider that she might've been claimed by the wilds.

Did you ever look for me?

Her mouth dried. She stared up at him, tears pricking the corners of her solemn yellow eyes as he mentioned her sister's name - oh, Elke! - then felt the threat of a sob as she parted her jaws to speak.

It didn't matter what had happened.

It didn't matter where she'd been.

She was there now.

"I found you," was all that she could say to him, as the tsunami of emotion brought her once more to her knees. No one ever found me.

tears, suddenly, on the river of ciri's voice.
mahler, snapping himself from the dread he felt for praimfaya, elation rising from its ashes to choke him with happiness. and still the thorn of pain.
perhaps, not too late — he reached for ciri now, sought to awkwardly bring her closer, unused to her new height or the hard muscles beneath her pretty pelt. 
his child, returned.
maybe mahler had lost enough children to be hardened to it, an unfair trick of the mind for ciri.
lavender stare suddenly burgeoning with his own tears, the dread of the last several months washing from him. "ich war kein guter vater," the man grated cheerlessly, searching all parts of her expression, her face, for injury, for the sheer skyrocket of joy that she was alive, alive, alive.
"ich hätte dich nie gehen lassen sollen," not to moonspear, not from nova peak; the ruin and guilt of accompanying his own children to their fate.

At last, he moved to embrace her. Ciri pressed her smooth brow beneath the charcoal of his chin, buried her narrow muzzle among the thick furs of his throat. She dragged herself closer to him, so desperate to tuck herself snug to his chest in the same manner she would've done as a child. The swallow was grown now, significantly so since their last encounter, but it didn't matter.

Her heart beat wildly and her body trembled. She stifled sobs with gritted fangs, and clawed her way forward as Mahler withdrew to look at her. Her gaze found the glimmer of tears in his and believed them to be true, until he spoke - 

"I have not been a good father."

Ciri blinked, surprised to hear him admit that when she had only ever thought the world of him. The swallow breathed a whine, but maintained her silence as Mahler carried on.

She could see clearly how guilt plagued him, but didn't wish to dive deep into the intricacies of it. "Ich liebe dich trotzdem," Ciri answered finally, simply, shakily in the language unpracticed on her tongue, because she felt as though she'd waited forever to say it.

I never stopped.

his tongue, sent back to him. a trembling sob. how like him she looked! how like her mother! how she had grown and become nearly an adult, out of his eyeshot. he considered phaedra, thade, astraeus — how many bonds left to mend, and he determined to sew them all.
"you vill come to rivenvood?" he asked hopefully, aware he could not order her to the bypass. wylla recovered there, but mahler now had a chance at regeneration, and he would take it.
time, he knew now, was not infinite.
"sagtannet has changed. i am — ve are," a trailing away. "i vant you to come home."
mahler meant for ciri to feel in such a way as he had not been able to do before.

To Rivenwood, he said. It spurred the memory of her mother's voice and their last discussion of how her father wished for she and her sister to spend the Sprintime with him there, and Ciri's velvet lobes splayed backward at the blow of it. Her mother was gone; Elke was gone. Where else was there for her to go, if not Rivenwood?

She remembered how small and insignificant she'd once felt among her father's wolves, and dread settled heavily in her gut as she considered the possibility of feeling that way again. The answer she wanted to give was "yes", of course - a resounding yes! - but...

"What if - what if they don't like me?"

he did not want the interminable decline between he and ciri to reach a focal point. her small voice reminded him of how she had been as a child; so grim and damning, that all the memories mahler had of his daughter were from when she was littler. when time, perhaps, was more simple. only it had not been, and was not now.
"vylla is there, healing," he admitted, cutting to the heart of the matter. there had been friction around his beloved and any mention of ciri or elke. his daughter was grown now, to a point where mahler felt it pertinent to be so direct.
he wanted to kiss her forehead. 
"like you she has been avay a long time. sagtannet no longer exists, in more vays than vone. she has — changed since you last knew her." 
mahler took a breath. "stay for a time. perhaps — maybe —" the searchlight of lilac gaze upon his child's face, asking.
but mahler did not have the right to ask, and so eventually his eyes dropped away.

At the mention of another who settled among her father's pack, the yearling blinked up at him with watery yellow eyes - uncertain. Ciri had seen Sagtannet's Alphess only briefly in her lifetime, for she and her sister had been sheltered on the edges of their home and robbed of the opportunity to bond among those in their pack. She knew Wylla only for the sharpness of her glare at the threshold of her father's cave, not for what she was called. With her mind and body too wearied from her trip and her grief, Ciri failed to understand who the gargoyle was talking about until he mentioned how she'd changed.

There had been only a small number of wolves among Sagtannet that'd acknowledged Ciri's existence, and not one of them outwith her own immediate circle had been positive. It occurred to her then, with the tightening of a muscle in her narrow jaw, that she hadn't even tried to learn the names of any of them.

Not entirely her fault, Ciri knew, considering her tender age, yet she felt the weight of guilt all the same.

It didn't matter, she decided. Her mother and father had both neglected to integrate Ciri and her sister, but one was gone and she grasped desperately at the chance to keep he who she had left. She would forgive them both with ease, because grudges were too heavy to bear.

"I..." a tremor to her voice, to see hope in the gargoyle's lilac stare. Elke's eyes, she acknowledged painfully, and averted her own stare as he did. Ciri inched forward once again, eager to press her smooth brow to the arch of Mahler's throat, and crooned, "I will."

Because she would gain some small part of him, and it was better than nothing at all.

"Ich werde."

for a long moment mahler thought ciri might decline. and what of it? she had every right upon their green earth to refuse rivenwood. had not sagtannet refused she and her sister? mahler felt himself tugged back into the inexorable loop of failure and grief, a place he knew he must not dwell in but could not help himself all the same.
ich werde.
a shuddering breath then; mahler gathered her close and held her against his heart. it was not so unfamiliar now, how she fit against him with her longer body and her mother's eyes; she was still his child, and he her father. 
it would not be as it had been upon the mountains. he would never allow it to be that again.
but mahler did not say this. words held nothing. he must strive to make a new world for her in noctisardor.
"komme, schatz," mahler murmured, though he did not yet release her, and would not until ciri herself pulled away.
then, and only then, would mahler remember the bundle just behind them. "are you hungry? vone of our allies sent, ah, food." stumbling, a father who did not remember how to be fatherly.

Komme, schatz.

Mahler had affectionately dubbed Ciri and her sister many nicknames throughout their early childhood, each meant to soothe and encourage, and to hear this latest one roll from his tongue for her brought about a whole new wave of emotion. The swallow felt it swell in her throat and she closed her eyes tighter, eager to bite back feelings that she feared might bring her to ruin.

It was a form of familiarity, one that she'd tried for so long to find.

She pulled back at last, and sniffed sharply to clear her nose before swiping a tear-streaked cheek across a raven forelimb. The gargoyle awkwardly offered her meat then and although her travels had thinned her considerably, she felt his fumbling contagious. "I'm okay, I-" she paused to consider an excuse, "I'm just tired." Not entirely a lie, for her muscles screamed in demand for respite, but it didn't feel right to her to help herself to a gift meant for another.

mahler nodded, lilac eyes soft. "i understand. ve vill go —" home "— back to rivenvood. you vill have a long rest there." suddenly paling inside himself to consider how long she had traveled, how many weeks and days, and all dashed by his own stumbling words.
mahler touched ciri's shoulder softly.
and then he grabbed upon the burden, gave a soft rumble, and began to move off toward the distant stone walls: the throat of a mountain after so many years of living upon their slopes.
perhaps in noctisardor he and his child might find a new beginning, but still, mahler was plagued with not knowing where ciri had gone, and knowing too his own failure in this regard.
he must do better.

At last, she mused, she could rest properly. Ciri felt s though a great weight lifted from her back, and she exhaled heavily as the dark-furred Graf nudged his scarred snout to her shoulder. She wanted to reach for him in return, to lean on him, but she'd stood on her own four paws for so long that she wasn't sure how to fully depend on another.

So she simply followed. Drained in every way possible, she pressed on through the darkness toward the promise of safe slumber.