Daughter
the voice in my head was no longer my own.
Daughter knows this place.

Only faintly; she’s tried instinctively to retrieve more information about it from her family, more knowledge about the room of bones and its faint chill that she barely feels drift across her fur, only to feel a sharp pain in her heart at the fact that—that Mother is gone.

Her family is gone. Legion, (she stifles a sob as she steps over a bone) missing, most likely dead. Pallas, Solis, everyone—her siblings, farther away than she’s ever had them before, with no familial bond to keep them always in touch.

Everything feels so lonely now that she’s alone with her thoughts.

Occasionally, she still casts out for a response—calling, mentally, for Mother, for her siblings, for anyone, anyone at all, to please, please, just respond.

But that response never comes, and Daughter knows it will never come, because her family has been severed from her.

So she wanders, stepping over rocks and weaving between bones, numb to the sight of so much death, so many remains that linger here still. Even when one gleams with a hint of a gemstone, she ignores it; lost in all her thoughts of loneliness and mourning.

Just a few days before, she had been tending to a node of Mother; just a few days ago, she had been comforted and helped by Legion when her magic backfired.

Now it feels so distant.

She misses her mommy.

@Auré

Strangers filtered in and out of Canis often, and Aure tended to pay them no mind. More often than not, neonates would emerge to the sight of a skull staring right at them and promptly flee. Unfamiliar faces would prowl in, find the scent of death and decay, and go off in search of greener caves. The Bonebound lived here, but he never would intend for them to have strict claim over the entirety of the cave; only to encourage polite regard for the long-dead and to not cause too much mayhem and destruction.

As such, the Bone King rarely patrolled - he'd more so just go for casual flights, circling the perimeter of the cavernous crypt. A brief tally of who was present, perhaps a Sentinel or two hunting a rat (the brutish one he'd tapped for bodyguard duty in that war most commonly) or some other Gembound would be wandering around.

A thrum of eagerness danced through him at the thought of someday sharing the skies with his own daughter, as he wove through a thermal and cut across currents to hover in another direction.

Paternal worry flickered through him, though, and he instinctively reached for magic. White flooded across his vision, but no clusters - no Hives. Canis was still safe, cleansed, clear. Damask was curious, perhaps to a fault where things like Mother were concerned - I should tell her... - oh?

Bright eyes blinked where they'd gone glassy and his body started to go blindly through the motions of flight. A small, white creature was trudging through the bones, her pace slow, measured - halting. She was tiny, but not exactly in a newborn-child way. Even from here, he could see that her pelt was merely hanging off, weight ill-managed.

Aure swallowed his worries of fungus and strangers, and danced down to meet the fox.

His wings carried him so that he stood about ten feet off - so he wasn't just a massive silhouette descending talons out - and bowed his head slightly. Frame made smaller, the wyvern took a few hesitating steps forwards, shuffling quills at his side the only sound he made. A long pause full of searching vulpine features, he called, "are you alright?"

@Daughter

Daughter
the voice in my head was no longer my own.
Wingbeats—movement—reach her ears, and for what feels like the first time in a numb eternity, Daughter stops.

The one who lands beside her is—big, in a word. Not as big as Azrael, she knows, remembering the towering giant of a demon. Once, the thought of him had made her feel safe, knowing that Mother has someone so strong on her side.

But even that wasn’t enough to stop the hive from falling, wasn’t it?

The stranger asks a question murmuring, quiet, and—oh, she remembers a humming voice asking her nearly the same thing, in what feels so long ago.

’Are you okay?’ they had asked.

But this stranger is not her family, not connected to her in any way. How is she supposed to respond to him?

Robin-egg blue eyes stare searchingly back up at the stranger’s own, tail curling around her as she settles into a sitting position. Here, it reveals the vague patch of pinkish skin across her shoulder, a spot still healing from her own failed magic.

’Are you alright,’, he had asked, and a memory of others speaking, rare as it was, flits across her mind, but—

—she doesn’t know how, really. Her mouth opens and closes uselessly, no voice filling the air.

She doesn’t know how to tell him that everything she ever knew or was was ripped away from her in an instant. She doesn’t know how to tell him that this is what she was born into, that her family was all she lived for.

She doesn’t know how to tell him that she feels so numb, and she just wants that feeling to go away.

I lost my momma, she thinks, uselessly; as if the words would ever reach him.

He’s not her family. He’s not her Mother.

I want my mommy back.

@Auré

The little fox didn't respond, not at first. She simply stared, eyes searching - her body rocking onto its haunches but keeping her gaze locked firmly. Aure's own tore away, drawn to the patch of skin taken off. It didn't look fresh, but... he knit his features in clear unease. They looked too much like the burns that plagued Eythan.

He moved to ask again - but her mouth gawped, a bit like a fish out of water and gasping for air (how ironic that he should think that.) A voiceless sound echoed through the air at the attempt, and his ears pricked forwards. Like Ash - Aure grasped, and shrugged off all worry of invading privacy, of digging too deep where he shouldn't.

Magic reached out tentatively, feeling for the presence in the fox's mind, touching the surface and little more - a surface where she thought in his direction, not-so-uselessly at all. A pang of guilt echoed from him, shared freely; it was simpler to just let his emotions be felt than to skim them off the surface of his own conscious.

It wasn't a full exchange - not like the persistent murmuring of voices Mother held, but it was something.

I lost my momma ... (He's not her family. He's not her mother.) I want my mommy back.

I'm listening, I'm here, Aure didn't bother to move his beak as he urged back, who was your mommy? He did not dig deeper to find that answer for himself.

@Daughter

Daughter
the voice in my head was no longer my own.
A connection, a—link—Daughter’s wet eyes go wide at the feeling of guilt that is not her own, of the words that follow—you heard me you heard me you heard me—a slurry of wild desperation hope is quickly sent back to him, because finally, finally, she’s not alone.

And, above all, a thrum of instinctive love, one that Auré might remember from his own time in the hive simply because it is an echo of sorts; a child learning from her Mother. All were loved unconditionally under the hive—she sees no reason any other connection should be different.

Mother was— and here her voice drifts off into a flurry of concepts and emotions: comfort, family, white buds growing and consuming over all else, (the thought met with contentment, not horror) the siblings she had now lost to the caves, a growing feeling of loneliness, kept at bay only by the comfort given by the fact that she’s not alone anymore, someone else can hear her—

—love, she thinks at length, pleading eyes looking up at the hybrid as if to ask him for a lifeline in this growing sense of abandonment, a silent please don’t leave me like this.

Her mind seems almost to press towards his, Daughter’s own thoughts completely open and fluttering indeterminately to the surface, something almost overwhelming as she claws for a bond like she remembers, a constant background hum of voices.

But she gains no purchase; only empty space and her own thoughts echo back at her, and she realizes with a pang of heartbreak that this isn’t quite the bond she remembers.

She wants Mother…

@Auré

You heard me, you heard me, you heard me - and a heady cocktail of emotion trickled through the link without restraint, almost deliberately offered to him and swirled under his nose like a treaty or peace offering. The notes were hope, desperate and cloying, the stink of love unparalleled, rot and decay and - oh.

The fox shoved everything that haunted Aure down his way, and it took all that he was to restrain his own reaction, keep his face carefully neutral, his end of the link empty bar what he shared on his own. Clots of fungus, wretched in their appearance, crawling through body and mind, choking his throat of his own panicked doing, severed from the node but still echoing the distant murmurings of not-so-lucky Gembound.

Perhaps some worry fluttered through the link, but he overlaid it with a gently prodding you're... so young. Mother's hosts cared not for who they drew in, only that they grew stronger and unified.

Aure did not let Daughter in, did not let more show than he wanted. How could he? How could he tell a child that knew no better that her Mother was not love, but a cruel thing with no concern but means to an end. Astraea was cruel in his methods and warnings - but the young King was quickly learning that he was no liar.

Heartbreak flooded across their temporary bond, and he mirrored it carefully, angling only that for her to feel.

Telling her point-blank might be best, he finally just decided, and probed along, that Mother is not love. With no other preamble, Aure let the little fox feel - and see - the Bonebound, Giggle, Kerberos, Eythan, their togetherness, their unity in all their differences and disorder and lack of servitude. He showed her their unspoken words, their caring, their love.

And he sighed over magic, almost breathless, that is love. You can find it - here or elsewhere.

@Daughter

Daughter
the voice in my head was no longer my own.
I hatched, and Mother found me, Daughter says, reminiscing on her own now-distant hatching with the briefest of silent sighs, a huff of air, another mental throb of loneliness. That is gone, now; who knows if she will ever get Mother back?

Maybe she is dead, like Legion, but—oh, she hopes not. She can't bear the thought.

So why, then, is there something so… off in the bird's tone? Daughter tenses—

—and, as he continues to speak, telling her that her Mother is not love, (no, you're wrong! Momma loves me!) she stumbles to her feet and scrambles backwards, the shin of one of her back legs hitting a loose bone with a hollow, empty thwock.

Those outside the family were—are—misguided! They didn't know—they didn't know—

—love.

Love love love lovelovelovelovelovelove—

No, no— she thinks, trying to cut the link, now; this stranger is bad, an outsider, wrong, she needs Mother—!

But whether she succeeds or not, it doesn't happen before something else comes through.

She sees/feels—with such a disorientating intensity that she freezes midstep—others. Unity, but not in the way she's known since birth; a link that requires no magic, no outside force, only…

...what? What is it that makes them love like this?

No, no—this isn't love. There is no love, outside Mother. There is only family and those who are not, those who are outside and misguided and—and lost—

—but they are not lost?

They are not—no.

No, no, she—she doesn't want this.

She doesn't want this to be love.

She doesn't.

That would mean Mother lied to her.

@Auré

I hatched, and Mother found me. That's... not fair, he murmured, voice ever so soft and tentatively extended across the faltering link. Aure gave it a shove of magicka and his voice went dead. His conscious went scrabbling frantically to catch the strings of their temporary bond, but they slipped between his claws and teeth with all the ease of water, leaving only the little one's unbridled, impotent, misguided, abused state.

Her... her love.

Daughter moved back, wide-eyed, nearly bursting ten times over with unshed tears. Conflict warred across her worried, young (so young) face, and Aure just stood for a moment. A voice niggled at the back of his mind, ignoring the empty, clear spot his senses'd shown him where the fox was, begging him to run while he could.

But, he stood firm. Leaving a child like this... he couldn't.

The wyvern took slow, careful steps ahead; he telegraphed each one with a rather dramatic, drawn-out stretch of the leg, deliberately kicking bones about. No movement was sudden. And, if Daughter hadn't bolted at his approach, Aure settled down next to her, offering a wing for her to hide under, sob into - and a soft "I'm sorry that that happened to you." A child. "It isn't your fault that you... feel like this."

@Daughter