I can't roll with these punches

Feeling him begin to relax against her made her feel better and as he began to drift off to sleep she curled up against his chest just like she would have when she was a pup. She was a lot bigger now, but the feeling of being safe against him hadn't changed. She laid awake for a while longer, thinking about her mother, thinking about how she wasn't going to be there any more. The thing that hit her the hardest was that she wasn't going to get to see how her father and mother looked at each other any more. She wasn't going to get to see her father messing with Zee and teasing her any more. She loved seeing them together and had always hoped that whenever she got to have a husband that he'd look at her the way her parents looked at each other. Eventually she drifted off to sleep as well, thinking of pleasant memories of her parents with her face buried in her father's fur.

She was sleeping heavily so any twitches or sounds her father might have made escaped her, but then there was pain. Sudden, sharp, biting, blinding pain. It yanked her roughly out of her sleep with a sharp gasp, her eyes flying wide open as she tried to jerk back away from wherever the pain was coming from, her heart pounding frantically while her brain struggled to comprehend what was going on. Her eyes found the side of her father's face, sucking shallow breaths into her lungs, seeing where his fangs should be, but they disappeared beyond her fur. She tried to pull away, but his forelegs kept her pinned against him and the hard hold he had near her neck refused to relent. She couldn't cry out or speak, she couldn't make him stop. She was frozen by the deepest fear she had ever experienced, gasping and panicking and struggling to get any kind of coherent thought through her head.

And then all at one he seemed to come to, his bite letting her go, allowing her to fall back into her floor of the den and as soon as she was free her instincts took over, making her scramble backward until she was pressed up against the wall of the den. She stared at her father with wide, terrified eyes, trembling lightly as a shaking paw came up to where his sharp teeth had sliced through her skin, feeling the wetness there, the blood. Artorias' words echoed in her head. Resin, biting Tamsyn in the middle of the night. A different fear hit her in the gut, a fear that far outweighed the pain and confusion of him biting her. "No... no..." she breathed, hyper ventilating from the panic that hit her. She hurried back over to him, pressing her face into his chest, hoping some how that might make him feel better again. "Y-You're not going to leave me, right? Not like Resin? Please don't go..."

"Briar" | "Marigold"