Let the only sound be the overflow [BIRTHING]; Family, Any

[Canaan]

Canaan

And maybe, I'll find out a way to make it back someday.
To watch you, to guide you through the darkest of your days.

  Her smile is enough to nearly steal his breath away, to leave his lungs empty and gasping for air. Before long, she is herself again - (though she is always herself; she is the wolf and the wolf is her, but to him, she would always be the viridescent vision of beauty and wit he had come to know so long ago). Draped in a sheen of sweat, his pale lips brush over her dampened brow, brushing away a dark ringlet of indigo away from the sheer gleam of light glistening within her gaze. His breath his warm across her cheek as his legs carefully fold beneath the girth of his gilded body, sidling up beside her and cradling her heavily breathing body close to his own as the bristling feathers brush across her skin and caress the heaving swell of her abdomen.

  A soft, featherlight trail of kisses are pressed gently and tenderly across the nape of her neck, his gaze flickering between her belly, where the intensity of her contractions can be seen constricting around the small and fragile life that lay within. She is gasping and tense with agony, but he is in awe of her, of the unwavering strength drawn up from somewhere deep within – ( I should have known such a pretty face would be the end of me, he had told her once, and he had never been more certain that it was the truth). Quiet, gentle murmurs of encouragement rumble across the surface of her skin, tasting the sweat and sunlight that linger there beneath his tongue.

  He had been so young in so many ways when his sons had been birthed from the womb. He was a wanderer, tethered to nowhere and to no one, recklessly following wherever the wayward wind of his soul carried him. He had left her in the autumn (breathy moans and a passionate entangling beneath a canopy of pine and maple), only to find her in the spring – no, she had found him (swollen and glowing and breathless). He had not seen her grow with the life conceived of their coupling, nor had he been able to truly know and appreciate the glee that wracked the entirety of her body each time he brought her a cluster of vibrant evening primrose as he did now - a craving he had searched far and wide across the starlit sky night after night, if only to see her smile.

  (Love works in curious ways, she had said to him long ago, and it couldn’t be more true.)

  He is stirred by his reverie by the gasp of anguish that emerges from her parted lips, before a small and glistening sac emerges at last. His cheek gently brushes across her shoulder and neck, encouraging Circinae to rise, to be her strength as her instinct urges her closer to her freshly birthed babe. Enthrallment envelopes him, watching each vivid detail as the teeth of his lover and of her lover tug and pull gently at the sheath, exposing the soft and delicate daughter that lay within. A pale cream, not unlike his own had been in his youth (now deep, and dark, gleaming gold with age), with a vivid emerald tuft tracing the subtle slope of her neck and hind end.

  He had never seen anything more beautiful – bright, wide-eyed and curious. He had taken the birth of his sons for granted – so foolish, he had been! – but he was older, wiser, and every soft whuff of air emerging from her dampened nostrils, and every flick and flutter of her delicate, youthful features captures his rapidly beating heart, churning it to a frenzy as his hazel gaze locks with her own.

  A girl – a daughter, and he cannot imagine his heart feeling any fuller.

  The emotion bubbling up from within Circinae’s throat is contagious, and he can feel the heavy pinprick of tears stinging his eyes, glancing to Jah-Lilah – as full of mirth and relief as he, affectionately cleansing the daughter shared by all with tender strokes. He watches her warmly, his heart stirred by the tenderness and adoration in her caress, knowing then and there she would take his heart as her own, too. He is drawn away from the imagery by his beloved, uttering the three words he had held onto for so long; the three words he had promised himself he would say to her – the three words he had thought he would ever truly know as deeply and as wholly as she had taught him to.

  His lips press gently to her forehead, brushing away a tangle of her dampened, haphazard tresses, ”I love you,” he murmurs to her, ”I love you and I always have – she is beautiful, Circy,” he whispers to her, tucking gentle nibbling kisses along her cheek, her ear, her jaw - ”Made-From-Love, she was.”

If a great wave shall fall and fall upon us all,
then I hope there's someone out there who can bring me back to you.

@[Jah-Lilah] @[Circinae]