Dawnlark Plains hair of the dog

Time without Grayday made her more despondent. Sure, she liked to think she took to motherhood like a duck to water - and while she fulfilled the necessary roles of her station it didn't quite feel natural all of the time. She just needed time, she felt, to really cement her place as more than just warm body and milk provider, especially now that she didn't have to provide the milk constantly. Her babies were getting older and more active by the day and Catori Corten could not imagine that they were almost two months old.

She chewed the corner of her lip before slipping past the puppy pile to check in on Grayday. Even if she wasn't a healer she needed to know he was alright, she spent her time on the fringes between two worlds it felt like with her mind split between all the members of her family and her mate too. She found Grayday still sleeping, tail wagging at the sight of him relaxing. It was past the time he'd usually be awake, fussing over a squabble or lulling his children into attention with a story, but this day was different. 

In many ways Catori felt she had barely started living, her age sweetly accented with a sort of inexperience that came with living on an island. In other ways, she felt otherworldly - her life was like no one else's really in the Morningside crew. With Grayday she had made a life entirely different with a mottled mixed family she loved dearly and added their own beautiful children to. Her milk-tea eyes traced his paws and up his legs, over the image of his face in the still quiet morning. It was almost too quiet. A sense of unease prickled along her body, hair beginning to stir and puff as parts of her logically recognized what the image before her truly relayed. Her heart was stammering as fast as a hummingbirds wings, and that sound was deafening, overpowering all else. Some sound left her maw but she didn't know if she'd screamed or howled or it came out as a weakend whisper of fury.

The cold enveloped her too, rooted to the spot, as her breath became gasps of desperation.