Nova Peak dearly

A prophecy...

Welcome to the world, my babies. Your births (randomized by dice roll) were prophesied by the witch Aspa, though how faithful her foretelling, only you will decide...

First born @Nowke "...your firstborn shall be blessed with the swiftness of the falcon, and with its piercing sight."

Second born @Mitoge "...the next shall inherit the agility of the stoat— clever, cunning, ever resourceful."

Third born @Chipeta "...the last... may they draw breath at all, this one will be fragile. The fawn and the fourth child are bound with a love so fierce, so fraternal, it devours itself. If your third survives, they will carry within them the weight of devotion. They will guard, they will protect, they will love."

---

The fourth dusk of labour is for holding her body rigid, gnawing on berry leaves which have long ago lost their tincture. Squatting to initiate departure, sweeping free membrane to commence a stirring of inexorable fate. Songs in ute mean to dance the children down as beaded salt forms and trickles as sweat upon her brow.
The contractions are violent, bursting from the inside, pooling blood out of her in thick red clods. Each convulsion feels the length of a night. Each time she stands up whole, and unbroken. Paws are slick with the icemelt of her efforts, writhing as agony racks her body. A healer, Ayovi is named, but all her strength is in her seeds. If any came, she would only be able to scream, and a thousand mothers before her knew what good that did.
Pregnancy is radiant, so she is told, but this pounding shock is not beauty, and the crypt beneath her skin which houses her world is stilling. Silent.
For three days the cubs have not moved.

In the coyote hour, with her body still contorted in pain, Ayovi drags herself home, dropping to the floor of the den with tear-stained eyes. Darkness pushes inward. She thinks she sees her husband and throws open her leg, revealing the red swollen skin. At the same time her muscles coil for another convulsion.
“@Skorpa. They are…dying. Skorpa... You…. must cut them out.”

---

i love them! they are not as important as you!

he did not understand! he did not comprehend how ayovi had gone from a thriving woman in the final glimmering of pregnancy to this wretched, writhing creature stretched wide and red with a pain he would never know.

his palms were useless against her aching skin.

he looked up;

around.

agony lolled ayovi's head, and skorpa's gaze tightened until it felt as though tears might be wrenched from the vise.

we have healers! but she was the most skilled; she would have already bid him call for anyone who had the ability to help them.

his throat choked; his words would not come, garbled, hoarsened to pieces on his tongue.

men had died in his jaws! at his hand! at his command! skorpa, bearswathed man of a thousand bloodstains, felt the vomit of terror rise hot and stark in his throat, for this was a new battle, and he a greenhorn on a muddy field.

his eyes traced along her body; skorpa drew a shivering breath, took her paw between his own, bent close. "hvor?"

she asked him to kill her. how would it not be that? he did not want to taste her blood, and fought again the weeping, but the tears came all the same, silent, crazed streams of saltwater which fell in droplets upon ayovi's distended belly. "hvor."

---

A hand, his hand, suddenly in her’s. Ayovi gasps and over a rise of convulsing agony guides his palm low between her first and second teats, beneath where their children slept. Her flesh rolls. Birth plans, prayers, blueprints, abandoned. Head now too heavy to lift from the stone, pounding visions through her mind’s attempts to think objectively. 
Their newborn flesh would know mother’s blood, but the huntress would not labor without reward. She looks up and through the dark finds the burning eyes of her universe, stricken in torment. Ayovi trusted such frailty to no gods, no healers, to none but Skorpa.
“Here,” her voice wavers, the swell tightening beneath their twined paws. “They… they need you.”
I need you.

---

ayovi; ayovi. "jeg elsker dig."

her alone. ayovi, forever.

he looked down now to where his beloved had placed his paw.

"jeg elsker dig." his voice was caught in the netting of grief.

skorpa lowered his head and began to cut.

red rivers. muscle beneath the stretched-taut filigree of her scarlet-strained belly.

nothing has ever tasted so bitter as these waters.

nothing had been so agonizing.

skorpa would welcome with eager warmth every bone in his body broken to dust as sacrifice to save the one he loved from this.

contracting; her cries would be a horrendous torment, but as she had bid, he would hold her to that blessed nest, searching through membrane and fleshpoint for the stifling life which ayovi had so struggled to bring earthside.

---

“Jeg…elsker dig… Skorpa...”
The den would echo her stifled cries, lips taut and gnawed until they ran with blood, Skorpa mouthbent as if tending a wound. But wolf-teeth cut jagged, meant not to incise but tear. Ayovi had filtered her screams into straining grunts heaved into the stone, driving outward from her inwardness, taking their place among the elements of the frozen morning.
Suddenly she feels herself split in two and carved, flesh giving way to even more stretching. It is a sharp,  outer-body pain that radiates into her chest where she struggles to breathe, struggles to register the existence of anything at all.

Until it no longer matters. None of it.

Because a face comes into view— a tiny, squirming, perfect red face and nothing else exists in the world. The falcon. @Nowke. Ayovi’s nose raises instinctively as Skorpa lays him against her bare belly. Him; cut as clearly from Skorpa’s bleeding heart as any child could be. Tears drown her frozen cheeks as she fusses over their son, tongue clearing the airways of a tiny mouth and biting the cord that binds them.
Then she meets her second pup, her gorgeous, redheaded girl with a face flowering and bright as the moon. The stote. @Mitoge. She trembles and cries and stares and stares. Exhausted, awed, brimming with a joy she had never before known, Ayovi holds her daughter at last.
With her strength's final momentum she waits for the third.
May they live at all…
A face is there, held aloft by the tender jaws of her father. A daughter of pure dove-white with the north’s bloodmarked mask. Ayovi cannot speak, but then there could be no words to frame what passes silently between mother and daughter, so strong and incomprehensible. The fawn. Her little @Chipeta. Upon each nursing babe and down the side of her youngest’s cheek do mother’s tears spill. Her lip trembles as she looks fearfully for Skorpa.
“Does she… breathe? Does she… live?”

---

ᛉ — for so long, things had been silent. trapped in a cocoon of his own comfort; oblivious to what waged in the world beyond the safety of a mother's womb.
each emotion experienced by the dame had played a role in weaving that of the boy that incubated within her. he; indebted with the ferocity of a northman sire, and the many bleeding emotions of a mother just as fierce in her own ways.
there came first loyalty; the stone upon which he was first created.
then came ambition. it roared like a great hearthfire, uncontrolled and liable to consume what all got in his way.
then love. he had felt it from the beginning, but only now came to understand it, in the smallest capacity that his brain could muster yet.
nowkē of winsook had been loved and would be loved. and now, he flew out on gilded wings. sweeping high, knowing the ecstasy of a first breath. extracted by the jaws of he who had planted the seed that sprouted into him, and placed at the bloodied underbelly of his mother.
his first cry was that of a falcon's wailing song.

soft paws tread the stone. light and careful, trailing the scent of honey-thistle and blood, thick and hot. elowen appears as if born from the dark itself, a bundle of herbs in teeth, kaldros left nestled in safe arms somewhere far from grief and fear. she does not speak. she does not need to.

"skorpa—? oh, ayovi!" she leaps to join them in swift motion, and takes one look at the pooled red beneath her, at the three squealing pups and the silent fourth, and acts.

"there is too much bleeding," she says under breath, already pressing herbs—cotton grass and caribou moss—where the blood flows like a broken river. her paws are steady—mostly. she has done this before—perhaps not the same scenarios, but similar injuries.

"you will be okay, just breathe," echoes of what ayovi had shared with her during her labors. she does not touch the white child, busy tending to ayovi. but her eyes flick there, soft and reverent, as if to say: i see her, too.

quickly, she turns to skorpa, seeking his answer.

She's moon.

The first breath was a cry. A howling that erupted from her chest, alive. 

I am here is the first sound of a child. Maybe it is their first victory, living. It is all she wants, and all she ever would. Squirming in the hold of a frantic father, moving ears too small to hear and a head too heavy to lift.

Mitoge of Winsook wanted to live.

The first scent was taken, following the nose to a figure so powerful that they could hold her featherlight. In the arms of a father, the greatest love. In the arms of a mother, the greatest protector. 

Crying, calling so loud that she could scarcely find mother's belly alone. It was will that crawled her through the pooling blood, blindness to know not what it was. She was ravenous, eating– An insatiable hunger that held onto mother with both front feet, back legs slipping through rushing crimson to move impossibly closer to a latched teet.

There was Nowkē. She heard him. He was wonderful. A sister, Chipeta. Mitoge thought she was wonderful too, and weren't all the voices in that small winter nook? A fourth, unmoving. She did not understand why they were still. 

At the time, she wondered if they were scared. They did not need to be.

From then on, love unbound.

That day, she knew she would remember all of them until death did her part, forever.
Hello.
Goodbye.

---

silatuyok had smelled the blood before she heard the cries.
but now, within the half-lit stone of the birthing den, she saw—and what she saw rooted her breath in her chest.
she gasped aloud, not meaning to, voice cracking like ice. spirits, you lose much blood.
the words slipped from her as her paws raced forward, chest already heaving with the sharp presence of spiritual fury. the very walls echoed with it—the shriek of ancestors clawing at the veil, demanding why. the air hung thick with copper and sorrow.
she called low but urgently, slipping to her side, pale fur stark against the dark, earthen floor. elowen. her womb—! ah, ah, we must stop bleeding, she said, her teeth already tearing open the bundle she'd carried on her back. moss. powdered yarrow. tightly-wrapped leaves soaked in cold rainwater. she pressed them gently but firmly to the place she feared might tear further, her every movement trembling with care.
but her gaze shot to skorpa once—only once—and in it was nothing but blistering disbelief, sorrow, and a quiet, soul-deep fury held on a leash of grace.
and then to ayovi, she turned back, breathing through her nose.
she did not lift her head again. her body bent low in service, in sacred duty.

one post from me, can be assumed sila is attending to ayovi's bleeding!

When change came, the little white singing bird rolled like a raven playing on the wind. Like putty, she was molded with each firm, intense caress- only to return to her original state when the sensation lessened. Her heart knew nothing of fear or dread, and even when the cold began to seep into the space where her siblings had once been, she faced her fate with nothing but hope. 

The first touch of her father was the gentle but urgent nudge of his nose, followed by teeth that would grasp her and pluck her from her bed of warmth like an oyster being pulled from a mess of kelp. No protest came from her, not immediately- she dwelled for a few more moments in peaceful silence, oblivious of the concern it might cause even after she was freed from her slippery cloak and felt the nip of cool air on the tip of her nose. 

Rhythmically her lungs were pumped, and with each nudge and lick she learned to breathe- as unsteady at first as a young dancer in ballet flats for the first time. But with each drag of breath came a chirping cry, each stronger than the last. She tasted air, milk, blood- and all of it made her stronger, a testament to the sacrifices her mother gave to bring her life.

Cameo, Raven's Call can be freely power played as assisting, grabbing supplies, etc

There is a scent in the air when one's labor begins. It is faint when Raven's Call first catches it on the wind. Skorpa's anticipation of children came to the forefront of her mind. A stranger still, to much of Winsook, the blackbird opts to procure a gift for the laboring woman. A well earned meal following her efforts.

The air has changed by the time Raven's Call has returned to climbing the mountain, plump pheasant in tow. Voices are raised and iron hangs heavy in the air.

The pheasant is abandoned as Raven's strides lengthened. Following her nose and ears to the whelping den.

Her heart drops once her eyes adjust to the darkness.

A woman of white fur and dove hues, spilling scarlet upon her newborn babes. Silatuyok is here, as is another woman whom smells of milk. Both desperately trying to mend the torn seam that was her wound...Her womb.

Breathlessly, she rushed to their side. A paw reaching forward to clear away, discarded moss. Oversaturated to be of help and further. Whatever is needed, tell me.

Raven's Call would place her paws where needed. Be it at the woman's bedside or to the ground to fetch whatever would spare her from eternal dark. She wished to help.

skip him hes in shock and not helpful, just holding the babies for now <3

---

ayovi.

a boy.

a girl.

and another daughter.

skorpa was beside himself. it was as if the battle was here now, in this den. ayovi. ayovi! ayovi!

she was all he could see.

the boy, shouting. the second girl, crying aloud.

the third, silent.

skorpa was numbed, worthless, as bodies filled the den. first elowen, then silatuyok, then raven's call.

he worked over the child against her mother's bleeding belly until the life spark was forced, and her baby cry filled the den. "hun lever, ayovi. hun lever, mit regnvand."

so tiny they are! his paws shook; his eyes dragged back to ayovi on their furs. his brave, fierce, beautiful wife! skjaldmaer of winsook, bringing life through blood.

and her own?

and her own! oh, Frigg; do not let her die!

to elowen, his voice a garbled mumble; "she said i — she said they would die." and now she lay poised to give all of her own lifespirit for the babes he had cut from her belly.

worthless; ginger; skorpa gathered their children one by one into his arms, bundling them to fur as he drew to the side of the den, leaving as much room as was able. his burning eyes found each of their scarlet-smeared little faces, and a strange kind of tears stung the eyes of the war-hardened man.

but over their tiny folded velvet ears he watched the scene before him, only catching glimpses of ayovi.

ayovi.

ayovi.

his tears fell silent to pup-soft fur, glancing between the incredible blessing of their lives and his own lying in pieces upon the denfloor.

---

“There is too much bleeding. Spirits, you lose much blood.”

Things have slowed down significantly. Shadows pass with hectic urgency. Ayovi tries to pay attention, but she is besotted at her children, tucked away and safe with their father. “Skorpa— our boy. Look at him. He is a flame, isn’t he? He is a fighter; a survivor, a warrior, just like his father. Our Nowkē.”

“Her womb—! ah, ah, we must stop bleeding. You will be okay, just breathe.”

Over some things even fear is powerless. “Our daughter, see how she glows, like the night sky? Bright and iridescent, and her little temperament; so calm and soothing, what the devout pray to. She is the Moon, our Mitogē.

"Hun lever, ayovi. hun lever, mit regnvand."

“She lives.” Tears drench the creases of her grin. There is no denying the strength of their last, for her warbling fills the little den with a triumphant song. “Have you ever seen anything more precious in all the world? Her voice— she is a soloist, a poet; a romantic with a starry call. Chipeta, our singing songbird.”

“Whatever is needed, tell me.”

Her children, named. Safe. With their father, and the capable hands of love that surround them. If ever children were born into a palace of adoring worshipers, it was their three. They were Skorpa all over, his fire and his warmth. Ayovi felt a strange sense of peace.

“Skorpa—” She only stares, blue gaze observing her husband from a distance. All the light comes so suddenly to shine in his eyes. Her mouth numbs, she wishes to speak, and cannot. Their eyes meet and she smiles. Skorpa.

How wonderful to be understood, and never have to explain.

Therewith all the awareness of Ayovi passes.

---

silatuyok arrived like wind against flame—rushing, fervent, her breath choked in her throat. she fell to her knees beside the mother, eyes wide with horror at the torn belly, the blood that spilled like river-melt upon the earth. her paws moved without thought, numic words flying from her tongue in hurried prayer.
tu’upa, tamai. tahiɣa’wa.
her body was slick with sweat though snow chilled the world outside. from her pouch she drew crushed redroot, chewed bitter on the run to warm it. she pressed the pulp into the wound’s edges, where flesh hung open like split fruit.
niaɣu... ɣarava, tuma’a, she whispered, eyes flicking upward only once to meet ayovi’s pale, pain-ridden face.
she could hear their soft breath behind her. they lived. they lived, but the cord tethering them to their mother frayed like winter twine.
she packed the wound with yarrow and crushed cottongrass, her movements trembling but precise. num’ukwaa, tuva xani, she begged the old spirits.
a strangled sob shook her, but she swallowed it. she could not break now. not while blood still welled, not while the scent of afterbirth still clung to the den.
when ayovi named them, silatuyok wept silently—tears falling into the mix of herb and blood.
nowkē. mitogē. chipeta.
three stars. three reasons.
her paws grew red. she would carry this red forever.
when ayovi stilled, the breath caught in her throat. not yet, silatuyok whispered. not yet—stay with me—stay.
but ayovi’s eyes were turned skyward. her body slack.
silatuyok continued her work, binding the flesh. spitting the paste against flesh. she had done what she could.