The Love I Never Knew I Wanted

In the blink of an eye, Chimera was up and in action, rushing to the doors and breaking the bedroom doors down to roar for aid. She'd never seen Chimera in such a state before, his overwhelming concern and urgency helping her to believe even if just for a moment that maybe, just maybe, everything would be okay. Tears had formed in her eyes from the sheer amount of pain her contractions brought and she did her best to do as he said, holding on while trying to get her panicked panting under control. Chimera was beside her again, resting his forehead to hers. She wanted to reach up, to touch his cheek, but both paws gripped at her midsection while her muscles tensed and flexed over and over. "Stay with me, please," she pleaded with the man, aqua eyes gazing up into his in the dark while tears blurred her vision. She could have tried to describe different plants and herbs for him to go grab from her study, but she knew Siren and Dalila would be here sooner than he'd be able to identify any of them in her stock. His comforting presence right now was the greatest thing he could provide to her.

Siren appeared only moments later, but even that felt like eons, and a few moments after came Dalila. Both women immediately set to tending to her. While Dalila prepared the cloths and began cleaning up the blood, Siren guided her. Ali looked to the dainty woman for direction, sucking in slow, shallow breaths to try and calm herself down, but her heart just kept racing. "Something's wrong," she whispered through agony-clenched teeth. "The puppies... It's too soon!" But no sooner had she spoken, another powerful, painful contraction hit her and cut off her words. Her exhausted body struggled through the process, feeling her body forcing the pups out far more harshly than should have been natural, the sensations more like her body was trying to reject the puppies within her. Claws tore at the sheets while Ali screamed in pain, trying her hardest not to writhe and to keep breathing.

Then she birthed the first pup—if it could be called that. At this stage in the pregnancy, the unborn creature resembled a puppy physically, although it was almost entirely furless, with a few patches of gray and white fur splotched across its soft body. The little boy was clearly still underdeveloped, covered in blood and afterbirth, and entirely motionless. The pup never took a breath, and its heart never beat outside of its mother's body. Ali was given a moment of reprieve as her body recovered to prepare for the next pup. She lay collapsed on the bed, leaning into Chimera, panting hard while straining her ears to hear those first mewling cries. They never came. Although her brain knew the truth, her heart refused to believe it. She waited, waited, counting her breaths to try and keep herself calm. "Why isn't it crying...?" she asked Siren and Dalila, lifting her head to peer to the two healers. She knew why it wasn't crying, but the poor woman's mind was so fragile and broken from everything that had happened since the start of the season that she simply couldn't internalize the truth.

She didn't get a chance to find out for herself though, as a second painfully strong contraction hit her. Ali grit her teeth and cried out in agony as she went through the grueling process to birth a second pup out of gods knew how many, another little boy, similar to the first—underdeveloped and unresponsive, this one wearing a patchy coat of black and white, just like its sire. The puppies were dead, killed before her body had woken her up this night. This was no birth—this was her body rejecting her deceased children still inside her. Shimmering tears fell from Ali's pain-filled eyes, from a terrible combination of physical suffering and the slow and total breaking of her heart as she waited, scarcely breathing, for her children to cry and let her know they were all right. "Why aren't they crying...? What's wrong?" she asked, looking frantically up to Chimera for reassurance, her voice choked and weak. "Chimera...? Siren...? Dalila...? My babies, are they okay...?!"

"Aliana"