Firefly Ravine how light carries on endlessly, even after death

Tag for visibility. Feel free to reply reactions. Will archive after a week or so. Back dated to the night before last.

The last several days had taken a toll on the young puppy. Most days she’s quiet, tired, dehydrated, and hungry. Often, she’d get too tired to eat and fall asleep before her belly is full enough for enough nutrients, @Chusi easily doubling in size before their eyes while Sao wastes away. The last several hours, however, she’s felt a heat that’s different from the wiggling body next to her and the source of her food. A heat that is uncomfortable, something that pulls her away from her normal source of warmth, and, lastly, the crying. Something isn’t right and the young puppy, barely able to see and hear, has no way to get the message across by any other means than crying.

Between the heat and the screams, however, she’d wandered a foot or so—and @Sen hadn’t brought her back close—so she could feel the cool breeze outside the mouth of the den. Little does she realize the moon, fuller each night, illuminates the entrance enough to brighten her spot underground. Late in the night, the others sleeping, young Sao whimpers and cries softly. Occasionally she’d get a sleepy kick to try and keep quiet but the burning slowly became unbearable as the night begins. The fever, undetected by her mother, is the only thing open to the rest of the world. 

A shadowy figure of a thinned out coyote hovers the den, curious by noises coming from within. Her eyes are closed and she doesn’t noticed the moonlight disappearing, rolling over and panting with tiny teeth exposed that have slowly been coming in. Before she knows it, however, she’s snatched up by the scruff and carried away, crying and squealing as the coyote bounds away from danger and out of the ravine.

It was often that parents never claimed to have a favourite, whether they actually did or not, so that they would not hurt the feelings of the others. Sen, however, had an obvious favourite—Sao. Not because she'd done anything magnificent, but simply because she'd been born first and had, for the most part, stayed quiet. In the past few days, however, she'd been quite the nuisance, bothering the serpent to the point in which she'd almost started to believe that she would never sleep again. While the younger sister's cries had been manageable simply by touch alone, the firstborn didn't seem to operate the same way, resulting in the mother having pushed her aside. If all she could do was cry, then she'd not be allowed as close as her sister was. Never had she even taken notice to how the girl had wandered a bit away on her own, for her mind revolved around one thing only: sleep.

Sometime in the night, after the woman had been left to sleep, she'd been woken once more by the cries of her daughter. Yet, she had not gotten up to investigate, assuming it was nothing more than her usually noises. Later on, though, there came a time in which she'd been dragged out of her sleep by some unknown forces, instantly alert, almost as if something had frightened her awake. But, as she'd looked around, she'd noted how there was nothing there. Just Chusi at her side, and... no Sao. That had forced Sen to her feet, eyes roaming all over the den before she'd wandered outside, scanning the surrounding area in search of her child. No matter where she looked, though, there was no body to be found. It was only after she'd calmed down that she'd scented the coyote, it's stench mingling with that oh her once wailing daughter. Directly after, she'd looked in on Chusi again, nudging the girl rather roughly with the intentions of getting some sort of noise out of her. To ensure that the younger child had not been killed while she'd slept, as she'd briefly assumed the other had been.

That wasn't quite right, though, was it? There was no blood, or at least none that she could see or smell. The coyote had not killed Sao—yet. For how long her life would continue, Sen did not know. She wanted to search for her, to locate the little wolf and drag her back home, but when she'd looked to the other one, she was reminded that she couldn't. Her focus had to be put into the protecting and watching the growth of the one that still lived, and so she'd gone back into the den and settled herself back around Chusi, doing her best to not think of what could have been.

Where's her mother-of-the-year award