Arrow Lake a damaged soul

tags for reference; no obligation to join! made some assumptions about ingram that i can change if need be. <3

too much time has passed since ingram left roangeda's borders to seek blodreina's grave. her father's been gone for over a week and unable to take 'sitting still' and waiting as perhaps @Dacio or @Aleks would've wished she sets off for arrow lake, each step feeling heavier than the last. she has profusely avoided the place of blodreina's death — her stony grave — and until now had no reason to visit. acknowledging that sounds cruel even to praimfaya but she has just come to accept the dead are gone and the living are hungry. she knew blodreina would not wish for her to stand over her grave and weep ...not as praimfaya had allowed herself to weep into her father's chest when they'd first made it to the fen.

the rusalkan crone is still at large and though praimfaya assumes her father can take care of himself — for his scars were either kill marks of marks of survival, she believes — she still thinks she should've sent someone with him. she ambles, steps slow as she nears the lake, not really wanting to see blodreina's rocky grave. not wanting to see what was left of her mother ...but to the best of her knowledge this was where ingram had gone and she paced around roangeda growing more worried by each passing day that he did not return.

she doubts blodreina's grave would hold any clues.

the scent of diaspora is long since stale and she wonders, perhaps a bit more bitterly than is fair, if it was blodreina's untimely death that had forced their paws into moving. they should've moved from the lake after the ex-general's death ...but that was long gone. it wasn't diaspora's fault blodreina had died and praimfaya does her best to quiet that cold anger as she forces herself, step by painful step, to approach the wanlida's grave site.

as she draws nearer, the scent of staling flesh and blood far too fresh and pungent to be conjured from her memories. she almost stops. no. ai laik wanheda. she tells herself. the commander of death. surely, the commander of death should be able to face her own mother's grave. a shrill cry of a scavenger circling overhead startles her and her hackles bristle as she creeps ever closer.

at first, praimfaya cannot make sense of what she sees.

the rock that crushed her mother. her mother's skull ...and then frostbound silver gaze slides to the fresher corpse whose muzzle is angled near her mother's bone one. innards spill among the grey rock stained black with aging blood. at her approach, a small stone is dispelled and topples against another, sending the greedy scavengers into flight and amidst the flurry of wings and feathers as they flee recognition settles in. cold, like ice. hard, like the stone underpaw.

a choking gasp is taken and she rushes towards the corpse, feeling her heart sink down to her paws. nontu! the worlida cries as she collides with his cold, stiff body, throwing herself over it as if she could reverse death. dad... she croons mournfully, pressing her muzzle against his stiff neck, ears splaying flat against her skull as she mourns and hurts over his death and blodreina's all over again.

nanowrimo: 555