Totoka River have faith in yourself.

backdated to before @Skaigona reaches WGI; set just before the landbridge

it is with a mix of emotions carried sharply in her throat that pakasqa — once-ava — stares at the wraith about to cross the bridge.

it is her mother, and yet like pakasqa and her not-ava identity, this one is something different.

the scent is the same and the skin is the same and the red along her back is the same but truthfully were those her eyes or the eyes of some other order peering out into that endless cold shore? was it her soul inhabiting those bare bones or was it something other?

pakasqa had followed her burning scent from the flatlands and known there was something else secreted between each fevered press of a paw to loam.

she follows, but makes no sound as the waves lash against the stony coast. she knows in a way that cannot be spoken, that if she sees her mother ford the numbing water here it will be her last crossing.

bracing against the nipping wind, the girl once known as ava lends her voice to the squall — a small, inquisitive noise filled with concern for the woman, now a husk, that had once been this girl’s mother.

what was there to be discovered on her island?
she had not seen simeon; she had not seen malakai. but they were alive; they were wholly and vitally alive, and she could not waste the chance to see them.
amadeo had cautioned her not to seek them out, and she regretted ever listening.
skaigona had never expected to see her daughters again. it was ava and dinah who had been crushed against the wheel of turning time; she had never faulted them for leaving her.
but her child's thin whine turned skaigona's head at once, a mother answering the sob of a baby.
and there upon the sandbar she stood frozen and wind-lashed, trembling as tears came and she called noiselessly into the wind for ava, for her to be flesh and not illusion.

the wind lashed between them and for a moment that was all there was.

but then the girl known as ava was running -- the ground streaking beneath her feet as she rushed for her mother in the way a wave rushes for shore.

she knew her mother was sick by the scent that clung to her, but in that moment she did not care. all she wanted - after all of these thousand hard miles - was to hug her mother again.

"ava —"
her threadbare arms around her girl; her tears tangling in that beautiful nape.
truly ailing then; truly grieving then, this cup removed from her: the sound of ava growing up into the woman she was meant to be even beyond skaigona's light.
seawind rushed them.

two far flung stars at last colliding into their orbit. skaigona's a waning neutron star compressing in on itself, ava's a protostar arcing into its first breadth of life.

and skaigona's energy passing through ava like wind through a sieve. draining, draining, draining until at last --

all the warmth in her mother's fur could not hide the death on her breath.

ava pulled away at last, eyes searching. what had her mother gone through, and what now would she become?

"i'm dying, ava," she said plainly into that wretchedly beautiful, worried face. not to crumple her daughter further, only to make her aware; "i got sick a while back. it's not getting better. so i've — do you remember the peace of this place?"
a cough racked her rawboned frame as she turned dull eyes upon the island just ahead, a hymn resting on her heartstrings.