Dragoncrest Cliffs dlo nan je

she could wait no longer.
it was @Val she took with her. mireille said nothing to any of the others, nor even sweetharbor. she only told her nephew that they were leaving, and at once.
the sandbar was easy to ford. the sound was silent.
sapphique echoed with the same heavy quiet, foreboding.
mireille took a breath as the borders loomed proudly close, and somehow subdued. she glanced at val.

they left in silence. for once, this was val's preferred mode of communication.

there was too much to think about, too much loss to parse through. a series of poorly strung together words could never knit that ugly wound closed.

at the sound val looked for svalinn. rosalyn was never far from his mind either.

each step they took closer to the cliffs, val's heartbeat quickened and his feet seemed to grow ever heavy. he dreaded the unspeakable - he dreaded seeing what he knew he would see soon.

eyes wide, he turned and exchanged a silent look with mireille. they would face the doom of sapphique together.

this is a rallying thread <3 the ones tagged are the ones mireille doesnt know are alive or not <3 so its like a headcount D:

sapphique.
mireille was horrified to feel herself creeping with hesitation where she had only walked in confidence. "go an' look for @Wing, @Rykor, an' @Jorunn," she said breathlessly. "i am going to look for our mot'ers an' @Chacal." she sniffled. "sobo too, i did not see him wid de bear." which had been unlike him.
the fight had been a blur. mireille only counted those men who had not come to the aid of their land.
she slunk toward bluepeace meadow on breathless legs, calling lowly for @Rosalyn as well.

his home sat in disquiet.

val nodded in affirmation - happy to receive command. only... he froze in his tracks as sobo's name left mireille's lips like a knife-twist.

she did not know.

already mireille slunk towards bluepeace. val was left with a decision. how does a man decide in what order to ruin someone's life?

sobo is dead, mireille. he choked, pursuing her turned back. val had seen it all. he had seen sobo along the beach, he had seen the bear, and he had seen that brute set its claws upon sobo's skull and --

he choked back the emotion that threatened to overcome him. i'm sorry.

sobo is dead.
mireille tripped; fore-ankle twisted, almost dumping her unceremoniously against the fouled earth of sapphique. her eyes were hot with surprise and a quick, vengeful anger. why would he say that?
but a single look upon his stricken countenance told her it was an impenetrable truth. she stood nursing her light sprain, and all the hairs slowly stood on end upon her hackles.
flames now turning to water; she thrust her tearing face slowly close to that of val, even as limbs felt numb and leaden —
sobo! sobo!
"was dat why my mot'er screamed?" mireille said, though she knew. she did not want to know. she did not —
her breath was a quick cactus-spiking of panic, and in desperation she flung her gaze to the sea, seeking peace, seeking something that was no longer her right.
and then she too screamed, though it was not the desperate shriek of a bereaved mother but the drumming war-cry of a wronged woman.
the graves. she left val behind in thought, not stumbling upon the rocky ground even as tears blurred her vision and rage burnt all the rest away.

Chacal ached, and felt starved. The days following the fight had passed slowly; Val had gone, and she trusted her would let the others know that the bear had been chased off. 

Chacal would sit vigil over Erzulie's grave, tending to Jorunn in whatever way she could, waiting to see Rosalyn coming home to them. For some reason...She felt doubt, but somehow, that doubt felt right. It wouldn't have ever felt like home, living here on the cliffs, with only one of her parents. But she could love with the spirits of both of them, chattering to her on the wind. 

Theo she kept as close as she could. And as for those who dwelled within her, they had begun to stir, and even over the course of just days, she had felt her apatite spike. 

Sapphique had been pulled apart- but it would grow again. 

She heard Mireille's voice, and sat up. "Mireile?" She asked, pricking her ears.

mireille first tripped, then looked back upon him. what was that emotion behind the fireshow of her eyes? contempt? fury?

yes.

val flinched, recovering just as mireille’s head came to gently butt his own. it was understandable — he remembered something in that moment and pulled away. a sense of deja vu which felt profoundly wrong.

her scream rung the earth. val watched as a pair of scolding blackbirds took wing above. when his gaze returned to the earth he saw mireille already walking.

and from somewhere, val thought he heard chacal call over the quiet.

earth, freshly turned, and maman's blood.
mireille drew up into a tremulous height; "chacal!" and she ran to her sister, already weeping openly in the uneasy air of the sea cliffs.
for a long time she only crushed chacal against her, rocking back and forth with a low keening into the beautiful dark fur.
and sometime later she turned her head to see the darkness of soil dredged up for two new graves, and she cried harder, something cracking and almost bloody inside her.
she did not ask after erzulie, mireille wept upon she was hoarse and her soul was wrung of all the tears she could give for now.
"mama?" she asked of rosalyn, her tone no longer holding hope but desolation.
for now, poor val was forgotten, the only man living who held her respect in such a formative way.

Chacal stiffened when Mireille bolted toward her- but relaxed against her sister's shoulder as soon as she remembered that she had painstakingly bathed herself several times already, to remove any trace of the poisons from her fur. A hint of red stained the golden fur at her shoulders; not a trace of poison or blood, but from the earth in the Roja den where the poisons had been buried. 

She squeezed her eyes shut but tears crept through freely, seeping between her lashes to slide down her cheeks and mix into the cinnamon fur of her sister. When asked, it took Chacal a few moments, and a number of shaky breaths to be able to summon an answer. 

"I 'ave not seen Mother since.
She chased de bear, I 'ave seen deir pawprints.
De bear left be'ind a trail of blood and vomit-
de poison dat Maman an' I bore...It...."

She choked on her words and whined. 

It had been the poison which had killed her mother. Once the blood had cleared from her eyes, she'd seen the evidence of it on Erzulie's lips. It killed her that she had not been able to cleanse her mother before putting her in the ground- and for a long while, she'd considered doing it, and accepting the same fate-

-but she was a mother too. And she would not let her children know the pain of losing their mother, not yet. They would struggle enough with losing their grandmothers and their uncle, and Theo...He had witnessed it all. 

She felt a stirring in her belly, the pulsing and pawing of little feet.

val kept still as mireille tore towards chacal. in his quiet heart came a thrumming of some irrevocable sadness.

here were two graves. the dirt fresh and dark. the ground impossibly cold.

it seemed cruel to lodge them under earth and stone, exposed to a dark world cold and subterranean. but they were dead; val reminded himself of that while hot tears streaked down his cheeks.

it was a small joy to learn rosalyn was not among the bodies. she had been in no condition to fight the bear! ah! his heart wrenched for his mother, so strong in a world of fog and smoke. i can follow her tracks. he offered quietly, standing a distance from the two while he looked in the direction of the blood trail.

cameo post!

The sound of Mireille’s echoing rage woke Cherub’s Wing from a fitful sleep.

She looked up from her snow-carved bed at Mossbloom and flinched when she was forced to remember the newborn scars upon her hip. They healed slowly, too slowly, and bitterness filled her as she resisted the urge to clean the wounds with her tongue. She knew there was no poison there still, that she only ached fiercely but had not turned to rot, so there was nothing to fear, and yet –

She couldn’t bring herself to touch them.

It didn’t matter that the saltwater had washed her clean, killing any infection or threat to her life. To her, the poison was still there. Somewhere, somehow, corrupting her, outside to in.

Her heart began to race as she stared at the wounds. She could feel the long clawlines squirming, reopening, gnashing beneath the scabs. She saw Erzulie, pristine, wise, powerful. Then she saw her blood-soaked, bludgeoned, dead, dead, dead. Wing choked back a sob and shut her eyes tight.

She wanted to call out to Mireille, to Chacal who had kept her fed, to anyone. But what was the point?

She was poisoned. Poisonous. Beyond help.

Beyond saving.

She tucked her nose under her paw and tried to see anything but a vision of the dead, of her own rotting corpse.

mireille felt that chacal smelled of things she had always known; she knew the crimson clay at her sister's nape for she had been born onto it. 
for a long moment she only thought of chacal's bravery, that of their mothers. chacal and erzulie had been willing to give their lives for sapphique, and in the end two had been claimed.
her arms tightened around chacal, and at last she pulled away with a clenching throat and aching eyes. her emerald gaze shifted to val.
she wanted to say yes. she wanted to say no.
mireille was struck with indecision for a reason she did not know. "yes. i t'ink we should — track her as far as de bear was sick," she said slowly, tiredly, looking to her sister as she spoke.

Chacal was exhausted. She had little room left in her heart for anything else; she felt relief that her children had been spared, but crushing grief knowing that Erzulie and Sobo had passed. Rosalyn was missing; now, Val offered to search. She looked to Mireille with tired eyes, and simply nodded along. Part of her did not want for Valravn to leave- she didn't want him risking his life if the bear had somehow survived. And part of her feared hearing the news that only Rosalyn's body had been found. But she could not argue; she she felt Mireille would have wrestled with the same conflict, only to come to this sound solution. 

She hated the thought of losing another brother- just as much as she dreaded finding out she'd lost both mothers. Quietly, she rested against Mireille, yielding to her discretion. "De ot'ers?" She asked wearily, looking up at her. "Who went to de island wid you?" There were many to be accounted for, yet.

last for me! <3

a moment of indecision hung the air between the trio. unknown to val, their trio had a fourth component. somewhere nearby, wing languished in suffering.

he would think of her on the road, for he had not known her fate -- but for now, his focus was riveted between mireille and chacal.

a long pause stretched between them. when mireille pulled from chacal, he saw her exchange a glance with chacal. when chacal nodded, val made to rise. he could sense now they had things that did not concern him to talk about -- when he was certain there was nothing else to say, val turned to begin his search for rosalyn.

he only hoped that search would not result in a corpse.

<3

"aminthe, etienne, suzu, lilitu," mireille breathed in memory. "val." he was turning, moving away from the sisters.
her breath was hoarse, throat harrowed with the sound of their living names.
her mother and brother, killed here. njord, meerkat, swordfish, stingray — rushed off. rhaegal not seen long before that. 
a blink. chacal here, with theo. rosalyn wandering. jorunn close.
their elder sisters remained. "quen?" she asked next, eyes moving to chacal's solemn and lovely face.

Her attention was drawn away from the lovely sorrow in Mireille's face for a moment when Valravn made to leave. There was of course reason to be urgent- Rosalyn was still out there, in one shape or another- but she called out to him, wishing her song could protect him like a cloak. "Be safe, brot'er. Please, do take care."

He sped on, and she sent her hopes with him. 

Some hope returned to her, in the sounds of names she cherished and loved. Her children! All three of her seaside children had survived the bear's malice- two of them had been safe only because they had been shepherded away in her sister's care. It broke her heart to think of the moment she'd sent Mireille away- but with her, she had taken some of her most precious belongings. Not only her children had gone, but Aminthe and Lilitu too. Safe, saved from the merciless bear. 

Quennell was the one wolf Chacal did not have a rational answer for. She shook her head. 

"He did not stan' wid me an' fight-
for all I know, 'e 'as taken flight."
They would piece their pack together, bit by bit. 
"De ones who bled that day wid me,
are Val, Wing, Theo, Jorunn an' Erzulie." Her song wavered.
Rosalyn's whereabouts was unknown- but Val hunted for her now. 
"Njord was dere; he saw de bear, an' ran.
I 'ave seen not'ing of de red-tailed man,
not him, his wife, or de two boys-
I t'ink dey left by choice." She stated. For all she could assume, they left together. It only made sense. 
"Rykor, too, 'e 'as not been seen.
Just as well for 'im; I am no longer keen
to 'ave dese men running, deir tail between
deir legs."

Her son, and her brother had come and fought. Sobo, she had no doubts, had fought with all his spirit.

She looked to Mireille, her eyes tired and sad. She felt a light kick near her ribs, and winced slightly. The next generation of Sapphique would be fighters; she was sure of it. But she felt herself struggle with the weight of knowing that the more children she had, the more likely the chance would come that one of them- or more- might be taken from her. Her eyes welled at the thought. She whispered her sister's name, and lay her head against her shoulder.

mireille slid an arm around chacal's shoulders, setting her cheek against that of her lovely, exhausted, grieving sister. the men of sapphique had failed, and it was a knife in her gut that she should share blood with such a cowardly wolf.
but quen, quen was only a boy, and her brother. mireille still hoped he had left with meerkat and her husband; her eyes watered to think of him alone, wandering the wild.
she felt that she needed to find him.
there was nothing to say. mireille exhaled a long and shuddering breath. "we will put sapphique back toget'er again, chacal. an' den maybe, i can go up de beach a ways."
would he have gone to the sea? would he have gone to the forests?
the obsidian's throat ached and she spoke no more.

She heaved a sigh; the idea of change was hard, but she knew it must be so. They would put their pack together, save for the few who had abandoned them. Their resolve had been tested, but at its core, they had been victorious. She pined for Sobo, and for her mothers. Now, she and Mireille had each other to look to, in spite of their shared grief. 

"We will ge t'rough dis, you, me, 
an' de rest of us, for we be Sapphique."