he has to have us put to death & we have to bury our brother;

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@Olive ♡

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how long a time it's been since she's hungered for the making that comes with the healing, holier season; for the thawing, and the thinking of nests, and the hold of strong, sure male arms, and the way a winter bride finds her home in the alcove of virile, volatile ribs. how her breath becomes his bellows, and his hers, and she is happy and fat and waddlesome with what they bring next into the fold they have made. and it has been so long since she has been heavy; so awfully long that she has been loving, for once so tethered to the earth by what she carries in her temporary, gleaming body rather than staring starved at the stars with wet anguish on her lashes.

lately, the need for her belly to blush and swell for the first time in an age is an ache. a clawing for the stormcloak and for the ranger and for the raven. for biting kisses that she does not deserve and the knowing that she might even be pretty enough, even be precious enough to him for more. for everything. for nothing.

yet, would that she could gather such a one to her and bear his cubs ... it might not be fair, insomuch that her heart is still broke, and though most of her stardust, godsung children are with her for now and ever ( or, so she hopes ) she does not know if they would take kindly to the hunger-now-need-now-ache turned newborn from her womb. could she love what came from her? could she love the one that bed her, but did not wed — at the very least, for a night? could she cherish those that had found her, while she nursed and tried to remember how to nurture true and well?

could she love ...without her faceless, formless husband? he, who she always keeps hurt for in her stonedead heart? he, who, no matter living or ended, she vowed once to never betray even now? even here?

as much as she knows, their children are not here; gone into the mists as they are so wont to do, leaving their äiti by her lonesome in the hall carved into the mountain by wind and water and worn by time.

riannon rests her chin on snowshoe paws;
sighs soft into all manner of collected furs.

perhaps it would be better in hoping herself barren.

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the staff team luvs u

tags for awareness!

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How strange it was that Olive was feeling similarly, and yet, how perfectly it made sense; the two women who called Cloudrest home, each the head of their small family units, the two who exerted influence between the mountains, the two who now ached and craved for another to complete the sacred dynamic of masculine and feminine; perhaps less so thinly veiled in their similar preference to those who dwarf them, and cloak their pale hides in a sidereal darkness.

Though for Olive, this was a near-constant thing, and she was unaware that she might be exerting an effect on the only other adult female presence here, or they upon she. An ancestral midwife, the call to bear and steward new generations was writ deep in her soul; she practiced it with an adept hand, honed not only through practice but through experimentation upon oneself. She had been a mother in other lives, but in this one, she had yet to bore children. This glaring erasure in her knowledge of birthwork perturbed her, but she was not one to force things. All things came in time, and if she actually never bore children in this life, then that was her sentence, purpose, and karma to bear.

When this subject came to mind, often Olive's next thought was that of @Tiberius — but these were fanciful musings that she allowed herself to indulge in, knowing his genes and demeanor to be of the utmost, superior quality. Parenthood, however, was a far more complex subject, and not one easily broached by two partners not tied through matehood. She wondered what he thought, what she meant to him, what he meant to her, what he would make of her polyamorous inclinations... Far less fluid than matehood, was packhood. A pack and support she had in droves, which perhaps made these musings not-so-faraway as the gamine sylph might have assumed.

However, these thoughts were intermingled with many other concerns, such as the welfare of @benry, and general curiosity about the ghostly woman Riannon. She did not encounter the latter often, so when she found her resting upon soft furs, Olive did not immediately turn away as she might had with others in repose. Instead, the waif drifted closer wordlessly, attempting to read the woman's aura and mood, determining if her company was welcome.

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im sorry idk what words are anymore ldhdkdbd ;; hopefully this makes some sense lmao

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such a thing would be in vain; inward disposition ever-changing, unpredictable, entirely metamorphic and all the more maddening. incessant shifting and contracting by turns as if raw ensorcelled sand and sunlight and shadow far beneath the roots of the earth; evident in the way her hackles shook themselves out and unfurl with each discomfit, quieted breath and fall-rise of thin shoulders. when her gummy, groggy moonlit eyes open once more, they find the spellsinger — that and druid and palantír, in the wake of the one who'd gone from them — and make a study without any whimsy or cordiality. ...but there has been a change, however subtle, a fraction of leniency perhaps not yet discerned by the other from where she stands across the way. she sees that her fur is as bleak as her own where she needs bruise-black and blue; eyes green where she needs glacial. the figure too conscious, the features too pliant; but she can recall nothing of her love even when she looks into the face of their most complimentary child.

her gaze wanders away and out; an absent invitation, perhaps, for the grey-gilt snowhite to risk an approach of her own choice ...as she contemplates her own. knows it is a process but, vellamo damn her, she has never been truly patient; so her eyes return to her visitant, narrowing, watching, appraising; tip of tail absent and dead-soft from where it curls 'round ophelia limbs. words linger on the threshold of her tongue as ever they do, but they are late to come.

perhaps there is no need for them, here;
like the last the last the last.[/narrow]

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Olive never knew what she expected from her alphess. It was supremely uncomfortable, whatever it was; there was a draw and a tie that seemed, most time, to have otherworldly origins. It was pulled taut and frayed whenever the two were apart, but together, somehow such fraying was not soothed — instead, it was enlightening in an entirely different way. This not only kept the woman tied to Riannon, both energetically and spiritually, but kept her questioning about the quiet, pale leader and what she meant to her.

No words were offered. After all, what was there to say? Some inane greeting or platitude — there simply was no need for it. Nothing that could be explored between them needed to be actively probed now; and, quite honestly, would happen on a metaphysical level even if they didn't actively see after it. Despite the carnal wants and needs that threatened to pull her elsewhere, for however short a time, the sylph would glide forward on ghost-like feet to circle 'round and lay abreast the woman who look so much like her mirror; in face, not in scars, but in melancholy.

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she either knows not what bids her to do what she does then, or she knows, but doesn't condescend to kneeling to hesitant truths — but it begins quietly, uncertainly, with a cant of her crescent jaw and the pink of her nose whuffling tight and shallowly at the palantír's unmarred cheek. stout ears folding back in a manner that might be timid; a snare in her soul guiding her mouth up along the gray temple where she worries at plain knots and burrs at the base of fluted ear. heart trembling from where it hitches in the embrace of her ribs; a bit clumsy in the half-dark of her half-nothing, bumping there and bumbling here with hushed, muttered lilts of apology when she preens the fur over the great vein of life and blood in her druid's throat; returns to beneath her chin to begin once more. laves meditively down the shadowed neck, losing herself to the repetition of combing gentled fangs through her ruff again, again, again ...

... until, when it seems to be enough for her, the witchking rubs her chin into the cradle of her shoulders; rubs the ugliness of her cheek down the spindly foreleg; lone gray eye hooded, wearied. her breaths shuddery, small; starved for far too long of such sacred sister-things.

needing, after all, more than she knows what to do with;
now grooming each wrist with tired, lax ways.

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Olive is almost surprised, when the woman offers her a touch. She froze — but only for a moment, before she acquiesces and thaws somewhat underneath her nose. She is then receptive and accepts what is offered; for Olive knew that the plight of happiness was comparison and expectation, neither of which she would engage with here. She allowed herself to be strummed like a harp, and very much felt the music that resulted.

The other woman's chin came to rest in the crook of her shoulder blades, and Olive's eyes fluttered open and her chin dipped down as she looked behind at Riannon, her tail giving a single twitch and then lying still. "Thank you," she whispered, in a somewhat hushed awkwardness, because she oh-so-very-much wanted to hear a word, even if it was her very own. The midwife was eager to reciprocate, but did not want to assume. Instead, she sat in the silence that always came after the utterance of a statement for which she sought no true response.

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before this – not that she'd recall anyways – the nightingale had been a gravesinger to the one who now thanked her. barely known by blood; even lesser for the whimsy-why they had been bound together as they now were. that she had made ritual the wakes she'd held beneath elysian willows might not matter, now; that she lies beneath her throat like the sister she's never known might be of no consequence, either. but she thinks of the boy with two lungs and a heart, how he'd crept into her dead heart like grinding ice and had gone from her arms in this realm into the next, phantom skull and snowmelt. ferried off to some faraway land, with nothing but a tender touch to go forgotten by morning. she thinks of her own brood; grown and ever growing with half their figurehead to guide them. she thinks of her unconventional palantír, and her own boy, and that godsforsaken lionthing who had come upon her lowly lands ...grief and guilt rushes to her, unbidden, a bright and hot veil thrown over her lone trembling gray eye.

she makes what she girlishly thinks is a valiant effort in hiding it; salt on her tongue when she bites her lips, gives a quick flick of her head; glancing away from the press of her spellsinger's keen green gaze. "it is no trouble," says she, sharp in clearing her throat for good measure. "it is always a privilege to tend to the tribe's far-seer."

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Something flashed across the other's face, though Olive couldn't conceive of what it is. A woman so layered, she had conquered Cloudrest on a mother's whim that went unexplained, and harbored stories she never spoke. Olive saw so much of herself in Riannon, but perhaps that was in visage and mien alone; for Olive had not the bravery to claim a mountain and fend off others, and she had not yet been made a mother and felt such a protective longing.

Perhaps Riannon was such a mystery not because there was anything veiled (although there were lifetimes and timelines that went latent and unrealized), but because she was everything that Olive longed to be — and so much more.

This led her to utter her next question. "How do you see me best serving Frostchant?" she murmured in a muted hush, so quiet that she wasn't sure if it was a thought of her voice. Olive wasn't necessarily the best 'pack wolf' one could ask for; she wandered and caused mischief, and longed to know other peoples and other cultures. She pressed her lips together and allowed her tail to twitch virilely on the earth, starkly opposing the softness of her voice.

"I want to be..." she breathed. "an asset."

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