[private] my words are unerring tools of destruction; femur

[Femur]

His son -

No, their son, is in need of a sibling. To be specific, a brother to race the wind against and spar with. Or she tells herself that she’d prefer to steal him a brother instead of a brainless beautiful sister that he might one day covet for his own once he learns that there is no blood shared between them.

Femur, of the magpie heart, has learned something too.

She covets the newness of them and their blind trust in her once they’ve forgotten all about their own milk-mothers and cast their eyes upon her painted flesh. Least, that is how she tells it to herself on the long walks when the tide is out and the longer swims when she has to hold her head up above the waves. That the fresher from the womb they are, the likelier they are to like her.

What she doesn’t fathom is this sudden desire to collect them in their infancies. Perhaps because her loins have felt the first invasive thrusts of her beloved’s thick length but has been left as empty as a dead galaxy bereft of a single star. She finds her stars in their tender soft heads that nestle against her shoulder and her flank. The dependent need in their imploring gazes is her tether to something that Femur has yet to experience for herself in the truest sense - motherhood, and so she steals and mothers as best as she can and no one has told her otherwise.

(Femur would not be denied. Not by him, her blue lover or by the overseer of the land as she fattens their ranks with fresh impressionable minds. No, is not a word that she is familiar with in this life.)

Night finds her stalking the tidal flats in the sea’s absence. It has drawn back, as if knowing her intent to peruse the places that a foal is likely to be left alone or forgotten. Some lose themselves and others are lost from the beginning. Femur, with a magpie’s sense of finding and direction, happens upon them with a coo and a murmur and a kiss planted on their tender brows. Like she’ll find him tonight - alone, disparaging, and she’ll bring her lips to his brow and leave a kiss there that is full of unspoken promise. But for now, she stalks forth, purposeful in her stride and invisible to the eye.

The forest is a familiar haunt to the ghost-girl and she knows it well. Better than most but not half as well as she knows the iridescent blue of her lover’s skin. Here, is a tree separate from the rest and the grass tall and sweet beneath its boughs. She spares it a look but has no time to answer the call of hunger in her gut so she remains invisible and about to leave that tree and that sweet patch of grass behind when a scent makes its way to her on the wind. A tender scent of milk, despair, and newness that translates into her brain as the scent of a foal and look, no mother nearby!

Femur, not mother, is who shall find him there, curled up asleep beneath that tree.

Femur, who sniffs at his lightly furred face and might tickle his ears with her whiskers.

Femur, who pops back into tangible flesh and shape in hopes that when he wakes, he’ll see her and she can begin the proceedings of stealing this one back to her - no, their - heart-home in Tephra. For now, Femur’s black eyes see only the colt - small and dark, and her soft croon is that of “Come wake, little brother” in such a manner as to cajole him from sleep and to her side.

(She is blessed to have learned how to make milk from her maiden teats to feed her first foundling. Femur can do it again for him.)

@[Gansey] no worries! i'm a might slow right now in posting anyway and definitely too tired to use html lol. <3