[private] Bloodfeather || Lepis ||

[Wolfbane]

WOLFBANE

The ground was soft enough that burying their baby had been easy. Soft, dark mounds of dirt covering up white feathers, dipped at the edges in blue. Each time Wolfbane closes his eyes he can see it, can feel the wet soil and how he longed to crawl inside that hole and just stay there with his son, let them bury him as well because he felt dead. Empty.

He hadn’t wept on the day of his return, bringing home what was left of their child for Lepis to see. The others, Gale's siblings, shouldn’t have been allowed to look either but Pteron was old enough so Bane let him have his way and hear his mother wail piteously. Tiercel had been at his wife’s hip but now the boy was a ghost. Quiet, contemplative, like Wolfbane was before he’d fled Tephra so long ago. He expects he’ll lose another son soon enough.

Eyas had been out in the Forest and he’d yanked her home. She’d tried to press a bit of happiness into him and he’d snapped, grounded them both midway and told her the news. Now every time his daughter’s flintlock eyes flash in his direction he senses a darkness there; his doing as well.

He was supposed to be the their patriarch and protector, but now he’s an animal who can’t cry and the buildup of those tears is hardening into ice inside of him.

Watching the sun go down at the southernmost point of Loess, his blue hooves sinking into the scorched brown sands of the beach, Wolfbane touches the sharp edges of Gale’s memories that live on inside his mind. They’re painful things, but the ache and loss is so real and necessary right now that it consumes him. He’s obsessed with the end, always the end and how it plays out, how it could’ve (no should’ve) been different.

Even the familiar sound of his partner approaching doesn’t stir him to look back. Not this time.

United with Lepis || Warrior of Loess || Father to Five Four

@[Lepis]