Arrow Lake "Drink the wine, my darling" you said

set loose in time - just had the inspiration randomly tonight XD

At some point, Fennec separated from @Killdeer with a promise to meet him near Epoch before they decided where to go next. There was something she needed to fetch; something she knew grew nearby, and unknowingly the very thing @Meadow had been here to gather when everything fell apart.

She was tired of hoping. She was tired of allowing herself to want the things she knew she would never have. So she would remove the wanting, this year and every year, until she found a new thing to hope for. One that would not betray her at every turn.

When eaten, the herbs would suppress her heat. She could know actual peace, and not spend the span of it thinking about him.

Undoubtedly @Germanicus would be a father again. He would find another woman willing, one he did not have to pity, and be all the happier for it. Before he left, she did not think she would have tried, if he’d asked her to go with; after she knew that wasn’t true. With him she’d known happiness again. It would have been worth the chance just to not feel the absence she did now, the complete and total lack of anything that was so familiar from before.

But he hadn’t asked. The only thing she’d heard in his voice was regret. It was only ever intended to be a goodbye.

She would put him from her mind the way she would put motherhood from it. In the present she would focus on her son and the dreams that he carried. Her own were buried; she would not see the same thing happen to his. Fennec gathered a bundle of the plants she had dug from the roots, hoping to plant them nearer to settling, and moved off with a new determination.

A new beginning.