Noctisardor Bypass [m] The taste of liquor on your lips

Making some assumptions about injuries from the raid~

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What wretched timing.

Wylla was still nursing her hurts from the invasion, both emotional and physical. She was still so angry that no one else had turned up to fight the intruders with her, no matter how many times she was told that the two she fought were not the only ones who came. Their strength was divided. She tried to tell herself it wasn't personal that she had been left to fight alone. Mostly, she was still sore, her wounds still raw, and her pride as well. It would take time for all of those things to heal.

Time waited for no wolf, though. When she woke with a familiar heavy and amorous feeling in her veins and the smell of fresh blood in her nose, she cursed aloud. Would that she could sleep it off and will it back another day when they were more fit for it! That wasn't how these things worked. She grumbled and rose from the snow to shake out her coat, then pressed her nose to the ground and inhaled deeply, seeking her mate's musk among the others.

So be it then. She had let it pass her by last year in her anger. She would not let it happen again, no matter how bruised and bloodied they were. She feared for a moment that @Mahler might refuse or be too unwell, but she shook it away and began to follow his trail, boldly waving her tail as she went. If anything would cure his hurts, surely it was this?

mahler was fucked up, as the youths would say. heavy bites to his jawline, the side of his throat, and his shoulder had stiffened. his limp was apparent, gait mangled. 
failure.
he groaned, rousing himself from where he had lain to recover.
and in the man there raged suddenly a malevolent and deep anger, unrequited and unsatisfied. it enlivened the man, so that when he stalked along the land that still held the faint fetid tinge of ursus, he began to mark. 
it was amidst the tumultuous harried marking of the violated borders that wylla discovered him.
for a long moment mahler only gazed at her as the air began to fill with the sweet command of her body. the anger did not abate, however; it drove out the pain and spurred onward his own desire.
the graf rumbled low in his throat, leaving off his tasks to approach, to bump her shoulder gently with his crown, to breathe all of her and know that despite his own inability, despite what had transpired in rivenwood, wylla was his constant.

Mahler’s path was unsteady, frantic, and heavily perfumed. Wylla could tell that he was angry long before she spotted him ahead, and not only because of the charged quality of his urine. He was moving in a less predictable manner than usual.

When she found him, they stared at one another for a time. Again Wylla worried that he might deny her this. There would be no reason for it. They were man and wife now and he had once asked to do this again with her, so she had no reason to think he did not want more children. But there was a hard cast to his lilac eyes, purple chips of ice on his approach that only melted when he lowered his crown to butt against her shoulder.

Wylla let out a slow breath and twined her fur with her mate’s, like slender fingers sliding into the calloused grip of a strong lover’s. She snaked her body sinuously down his side and pressed her nose into the junction of her neck and shoulder. Her touch was soft; she knew he was in pain there.

Knowing it did not stop the urgent spark of want in her stomach or her gaze when she brought it back to his. Rivenwood would heal. They would heal, and new life would help to mend them all.

in another moment perhaps mahler might have spoken, might have said something poetic, one of his stirring reverent prayers for the future. but in this one there was nothing but wylla. she wound herself around him and mahler felt the anger hitch and dissolve for a moment.
in this moment he saw himself as vitally feral, reaching with blind want and no strategy for his mate, his wife. he thought of the year before, when he had found her; no. his mind roved away from that. it did not matter. she was here now, present with him.
their eyes met, the sungold and the lilac that their eldest bore together. mahler lowered his broad head, lying it over her shoulders for a moment. he pressed a kiss to her side and then another, running his own charcoal body against the small radiant strength of her own.
healing after failure. 
rivenwood taking a firm and defiant step forward.

They had lost a year. It was both their stubbornness. Wylla, feeling undermined, begging for Mahler to start life anew with her somewhere else, and Mahler, feeling scorned, digging his heels in, insistent that the life he had built himself was more important than the one she dreamed of.

Even now she had moments of self-doubt where her inner voice whispered to her that she had abandoned every dream she had for her life in favour of his. Even now there was a niggling doubt that the life she lived was fulfilling in all the ways she wanted it to be.

They had lost a year, and she did not plan to lose another, and not only for love and stability, things she felt they could provide when they had not before, but because Wylla was unmoored and purposeless outside this relationship now and desperately needed... Something more. That was a deeply buried secret she would never, ever tell. She did not think of it often, but it was not entirely selfless, this desire. No. Nothing Wylla did was ever entirely selfless.

Regardless of what drove her, she and Mahler deserved this this year. Both of them. So she wound her lithe body against his, relished the firm muscle even after his body's wasting, leaned into his affections, stole heated kisses and uttered purling growls to stoke his passion while she warmed the air around them with spring's hopeful glow.

it worked. she worked. he was hers swiftly and forever, and more now as the veil of her want and promise stirred around them with a pinkwrought glow — mahler and wylla, filling themselves with one another. mahler held his control as long as he was able, reveling in every part of her body against his, her yielding, her desire.
her stark want of him filled mahler with the youthful sensation of eternality.
when mahler was finally no longer able to resist wylla's beckoning, his powerful arms went around her.
rivenwood fell away, his own failures, the raid, the pain blossoming in his body.
there was only her, only his breath and her own twining, only two individuals who had lost one year and were determined to harmonize until the memory of that space was all but forgotten.