Sawtooth Spire i’m looking down the barrel of a string-bean

@Mahler? whenever you have time <3

take one step past the cloudberry bushes, mother had turned to say to her children (but most pointedly at her audacious girlchild) punctuated by a biblical-adjacent threat: and i’ll have you trapped in the den with a wasp nest and roll a rock on front of it. she then departed to find food or whatever.

she’d either really meant it and had a corrupt sense of justice or hadn’t meant it at all and had a corrupt sense of humor. either way, corrupt. up to the hilt. 

phaedra huffed a bored sigh. she didn’t even know what cloudberries looked like. her eyes stravaged along the treeline, looking for shrubbery that grew the clouds and their apparent fruits. failing that, she then gazed up at the sky and squinted suspiciously at the buttermilk clouds. if the clouds had berries, why didn’t they come down with the rain? is that why things flew up there, to eat the sky fruits? most things adults said to her didn’t make a lot of sense, but telling her not to go past something without explaining what that something was really vexed her and it would take a while to pick at that burr on her mind. 

she scoured the ground and spied the white caps of mushrooms, turning to see them all encircling her in a fairy ring. these sort of looked like clouds, she supposed, but they weren’t really … on bushes ... and where was the fruit? phaedra glanced round for thade, but saw no sight of him, and gleaned from his absence that he must have turned in for the afternoon. 

an even more dramatic sigh passed her lips and she slumped into the grass. surrounded by toadstools, half-lidded gaze landed on a frog as it stared at her from its roost on a nearby rock. they had a staring match for a few moments, until, to her disgust and horror, its throat intumesced and a croak followed.

she screamed.

the adoption of astraeus into the fold had been surprisingly difficult for the gargoyle. not that he disliked the boy or did not welcome him, simply that mahler had been given two, adjusted to two, and now there was an unexpected third.
he tried awfully to give the child no less attention than the first pair, though this proved hard to do when phaedra and thade demanded food and attention at every turn, and he could not very well nurse the tiny one.
he found himself left with all three of them, long before he was confident in it. but that was the way of things. wylla would hunt. she had tirelessly fed his brood until he could help, and she had earned her respite.
he had just nodded off next to the sleeping infant when phaedra's sonic boom of terror reverberated off his ears. mahler came alive immediately, even taking two steps outside the den before his tired mind clicked back on. how could he go to his daughter and leave the infant? should he wake the boy? oh why had anyone left him in charge? she was close, just in the distance, so mahler cleared his throat and charged off to find his spawn quaking at the rotund slimy body of an amphibian. 
was that all? that was cruel, of course it would be scary. "phaedra, schatz, it is a fat cousin of a frog. look how plump. he eats the snails and sings loudly to find his vife. and now ve must go back before your mother returns and finds the little vone alone." he would never be allowed to watch them again. "now vhere is your brother," mahler mumbled, moving back to where he could spy the den, beginning the daunting game of child-pick-up along the way.

her scream was swiftly attended to by the fatigued explanation of her father. phaedra looked up at mahler, goggle-eyed, then turned her gaze back toward the source of her (and her father's mislain) grave concern. "o." she whispered quietly, slinging an ear towards him to dissect all the relevance imparted to her jurisdiction of interest and doing away with the lees of his tired angst as to her mother's return.
phaedra did not budge from her fairy circle, despite his urging. she had not passed the cloudberries—mother was of little importance, she had done no wrong. papa was always joyful in her presence, and she, presently so taken up with the frog and the storied refrain for his bride, did not notice the edginess in her father's demeanor. 
the new addition made her head swim with overwrought feelings and mean, troubling urges. at his mention she hid a black look.
she cherished time outside the den for this reason and for the first time, outright ignored her father when he posed his mumbly question regarding her brother. how was she to know? but she did not listen either way.
instead, she pattered her feet with restrained impulse to jump at this frog, and when it bwaaaaach'd again, phaedra screeched loudly and fell over with giggles.

phaedra did not come along; mahler had already turned through the undergrowth, lowering his muzzle for weary snuffling along the trail of thade's scent. instead, the laughter of his insouciant liebling trickled brooklike and pleasant behind him.
mahler made a pointed about-face. at any other time, he would have been amused to hear phaedra's new regard of the slick-skinned thing; at this very moment, his nerves were fraught. summarily, the gargoyle spread his heavy jaws, closed them carefully around the round sides of the wolf-child, and carried her at a trot toward the den where he desperately hoped astraeus still slept.
thade would have to be fetched next; herding the wildcat whims of his children was a feat.

she anticipated it now, the membrane of the frog’s throat engorging like a balloon, and delighted even more in the funny roo-roo-room sound that came from its bumpy, mucus-slick body. she felt compelled to lick it. 
bereft of any hunting prowess whatsoever, the bullfrog sidestepped her giddy lunge and hopped through the ferns—presumably to find his wayward missus. 
before phaedra could accompany her new croak-and-dagger preoccupation, mahler bodily intersected her path and her attempts to body-swerve him to continue past were unsuccessful.
scruffing her, he toted his daughter back to the den with an air of irritability, though she was too busy trying to squirm out of his grip to notice it. a most dreadful feeling curdled her stomach like old milk once he plopped her back at the threshold of the den wherein the castaway slept.
papa turned his back and started away again to look for her brother,  but phaedra, heedless as ever, pursued him in gamely skips, seizing his bottlebrush tail in a vice of puppy teeth and tugging back playfully but rough, as though there was an unconscious undertow of spitefulness astir.

mahler was ill-equipped for discipline. every iota of him resisted taking such a harsh role with any chilld. save for those of caiaphas, for he had hated all about her and regretted harassing her brood only belatedly. another thing to be entombed with him. 
his mind had turned to thade as he stalked off, but in the next his ear flicked and he felt the million-pinprick clamp of phaedra's needlemouth around his tail, followed by rambunctious tugging. the weight of her small body snapped annoyance through mahler. with a yank of his heavy plume, he sought to pull it roughly from her jaws.
at the same moment he loomed close, circling back to hover his chin above her crown, head atilt to show the wide ridges of his ivoried teeth. a growl rusted in the wide bellows of his chest, and amethyst scourged phaedra's bluebell gaze.

o, this was not how playtime was meant to go. she was presumptuous to believe that even the charm distilled in the thimble of her toe was enough to break the grouchy spell he was in. she was informed of her wrongness the moment the atmosphere between them became charged with something that caused an anvil drop in her tummy.
her innocently ludic pursuits. his severity of bearing forged weary and tense from disrupted obligations. they were diametric beings in that moment.
with a yank, his tail was free of her mouth, though she was left spitting out a few of his winter-fur tuffets that clung to her tongue.
she straddled the grass, feeling so very much like a fay in the shadow of a giant. when he drew in close to her crown, she relaxed somewhat, expecting a kiss on the forehead or a whispered endearment. a small smile plucked at the corners of her mouth—
the smile's proem receded into the lines of her face when the kiss never came, bared teeth in its stead, presenting an echeloning of pale soldiers ready to march against her flesh at any moment. she lowered her ears—which caught the peal of thunder in his chest with a visible flinch. phaedra avoided his gaze, even pinched her eyes shut, but felt its scathing visitation nonetheless. 
quietly she stepped back from him, looking anywhere but at him, until she was midway between the threshold and the den’s passage. mother corrected her regularly, teeth and all, but papa was her … papa was papabär. he played with her even if she’d just bounced on his belly during sleep, gently regaled her in their secret language just to hear her giggle.
he’d even snuck her out one night when the world was asleep, when she was littler, showing the moon to phaedra (or perhaps showing phaedra to the moon).
he’d never … 
but he did.
finally the pale girl looked up and met his eyes, sitting her bottom down at the threshold of the den.

and now time for an inner calamity, for as phaedra's silkfloss features crashed and she backed away from him, mahler felt his heart break. her gaze upturned and in it he assured himself he could see the death of their familial bond and the dashing to bits of his baby's little heart.
regret and anguish juddered along his features. "schatzi," he whispered as yearworn ears fell back against the broad breadth of his skull.
this was not his milieu! he was there to dry their tears, not provide reason for them. for a long endless moment, the gargoyle teetered between what he must do and what he wished to do.
but thade was out there, and mahler could spare phaedra only a last guilty blink before he set off again, assured she would stay put and sickened by how horrified she must be to heed him now.

schatzi, he whispered. the dark-fringed eyes cast down at her feet, then.
she thought how her chest felt like a gutted walnut shell, and wondered if that sensation might last forever.
when she glanced back up, her father was gone. 
she felt wrong. the basilisk gaze with which he had regarded her etched in her mind. his exasperated address of unwelcomeness sharp in her memory's focus. her eyes shimmered with angry tears that pooled but did not fall.
within the den, her parent’s charge stirred, but she did not move from her post to tend to what he sought—mean thoughts gathered around her mind like steel wool as she considered him.
little did she know of the emotional schism that she would have to cope with in just a few short weeks, when mahler’s time for her would be spread even thinner. 
stepping from the den, she curled up just outside its entrance and stared towards the rutted path her mother had taken, waiting for her return so she could nurse to soothe her sore feelings. phaedra laid her chin on her paws and struggled to keep half-lidded eyes open, but sleepiness shortly lured her into unconsciousness. 

by the time she awoke, she was back in the darkness of the den, surrounded by the sound of sleeping bodies. she didn’t know who was pressed against her, but the girl stood up and took herself to an isolated corner of the den and went back off to asleep with a frowning brow.