Lay Down Your Weary Tune

She'd gotten longer with her litter than she'd expected, weeks that she had been able to watch her children grow. Name them, care for them, watch as their eyes and their ears opened and they began to toddle around, watched them begin to learn to interact with the world each in their own unique, brilliant way. She was so, so very proud of them and what they would accomplish one day.

But she knew she would never see that day.

The pregnancy atop the long sickness and her advanced age had taken too much of a toll on her body, and she had been visibly fading for some time. It was a miracle that she thanked the gods for every day that she'd been able to keep her pups fed as much as the voracious mouths had needed. Now they were approaching the time that they would naturally wean, and would no longer need her. She found it... bittersweet.

It was perhaps the thought that they no longer needed her, that she could lay down the burden of struggling to stay conscious and lucid another day, that the pain could finally end. Maybe it was just her time to go, that she'd lost the fight. Whatever it was, as she watched the pups sleeping that evening she felt some indefinable something slipping away from her, and she knew the fight was over. "Tanken," she whispered, drawing the raven's attention as he woke to watch her with his odd almost-crimson eyes. "Tanken, please watch over the children for me. I must go." The raven, not yet realizing that he was agreeing to more than watching the pups while she went outside to take care of bodily necessities, clacked his beak and nodded, settling back onto his perch.

"Come outside," a star-eyed wolf said softly from her side. "Your children do not need to wake to this."Obedient to her gods as she ever was, Alfrun rose to her paws and tottered out of the den, leaning into the star-eyed wolf's shoulder, but had to sink down again from dizziness once she'd cleared the den entrance. The star-eyed wolf crouched beside her, waiting. The dizziness receded, and with it the pain, and Alfrun stood again after a moment. She was filled with a warmth and energy she hadn't felt in some time. The Other World she'd always seen with her strange eye filled her view entirely and wrapped around her.

The star-eyed wolf gave her a moment to absorb and bask in the painlessness before rising again. "Come, Little Sister," the wolf said. "It is time for you to go. Worry not for your little ones," the wolf added as Alfrun hesitated and glanced back at the den. "You know they will be loved and cared for after you are gone. Their father has accepted them as his own. They will be his responsibility now."

That might not have been very reassuring to anyone else who knew Jupiter, but Alfrun had always had more faith in her wayward husband than anyone, despite the mistakes he'd made. He'd not been faithful to her, no, but he was and would be a wonderful father. He would rise to the occasion. She had faith in him. So, leaving her body behind to cool beside the entrance to her den, she followed the star-eyed wolf without another backward glance.