Sequoia Coast first;

another morning rose on a coast that was not their own. heda had slept beside @Ava Amara that evening; she had embraced the girl, secondborn as if she had grown inside the pale body. and it was always so, and would always be so.
ava's burden would not be dinah's burden; dinah's burden was their mother. heda saw how the younger could amuse her through amusing herself, how ava's resilience might feed her own.
the day rose and heda roused herself to hunt, stumbling on land as she did not on sea; a scrawny rabbit her offering.
she did not eat; she left it to her girls, eyes trained once more toward the empty island and its graves.

since they left the island mama had not eaten that ava had seen.

the girl turned the offered hare over in her mouth. if it had any flavor to it, she couldn’t tell. grief had even stolen the purest of senses from her; the pleasure of taste.

ava swallowed the gristle and wiped her chin.

oh! she missed the island. she missed feeding psalm. she missed the warmth of summer. she missed her daddy. her siblings. judah.

don’t break don’t break don’t break

and now like a dandelion’s soft bloom, they were scattered to the wind.

ava tore a chunk, wandering over to her listless dam. the strip of meat was held before heda with a growl — eat, she insisted by thrusting it to her face while she stared mournfully at an island that would never love them back. ava’s gesture was half firm, half panicked by worry.

i cant lose you too.

fine.
two bites, two movements, everything reduced to the grind of jaw and the way blood oozed between her teeth. she ate so ava could see her, though the eyes remained unfocused.
heda daydreamed of rivenwood, filling in her memory's gaps with things she created, and all the while breathing life into an image of existence without the sea.
she ate, and when she was finished, heda lifted a languid arm for ava to slip beneath. dream with me/sleep by me/breathe in me.
what was god was not. what was mother was not. what was father was no more. heda was lost.

a glimmer of hope cracked ava’s concerned features to see mama eat! oh! her gaze cast around for dinah; did she see?

it is a sorry kind of consumption, just enough to eek out another day — but it is a small success in an endless stream of bludgeons. it will do.

she set aside the hare, seeing heda’s inviting arm. but first she rose, nosing along the brush until a late verbena flower caught her attention. this she plucked, and carried back — head ducking as she crawled under her mother’s embrace and put the flower at heda’s paws.

she wondered if @Seal knew the sign for flower; in silence, she signed seaweed over and over again until suddenly she was crying and the tears could not stop and her breath came in harsh gasps that cut her throat and every exhale sent the petals at heda’s feet fluttering until at last there was no more tear to cry and her reserves were used up and she sat there in the warmth of her mother’s arms as hollow as an empty clamshell cracked over the stones.

he loved you. he loved you so much and i cursed him for it.
the scent of flowers filled her senses, jarring her to tighten arms in protective communion around ava. the girl's sorrow allowed heda to bank the rising tide of her own. so interred, her voice had no hymns or murmurings, but her breath was steady, her embrace vital.
there was a keen in her throat that could not quite be born.
heda let it settle into her body, swaying them both softly to and fro. like the waves, both salt and womb.
like stalks of sweet lavender, nodding over the final resting place for a man she had not been allowed to love for enough years.

a moment shared between survivors of grief that seemed it might last forever —

at last ava’s shaking breaths steadied against the rise and fall of heda’s sides. her mama, sentinel — standing while around them everything crumbled to ruin. 

ava would not lose sight of that. 

while her mama’s unborn cry did not rent the air, its passion lingered between the two of them. 

ava worried the little flower between her paws, head slumped against heda’s shoulders as a desperate and lonely tiredness took her.

and heda held ava, willing the girl into sleep, into a slumber that would heal and restore.
for her part, the mother skimmed through a half-dozen hymns in her mind, and twice as many prayers, and found nothing to say, nothing to utter.
she rocked her baby as the sea retreated and etched itself forward in the sand, filling her eyes, her throat, her mind, her heart, with all the taste and touch of saltwind and sweetharbor.
they would go on.
they must.

go on they would; but at what cost?

as tiredness sunk into her veins, ava turned to her mother’s embrace. her mother, now a husk —

what the girl would not do to see life breathed anew in those eyes; what she would not do to see Caracal walk this earth again —

she was rocked in the rhythm of the sea. 

ava slept. 

while heda could not summon a song, a song was there nonetheless — the hymn of love. 

for love always remained.