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Naunet · **04-18-2014, 11:03 PM**

"She's my daughter, not yours!" In a conflict of action, her fingers locked in a white-knuckled grip about the leather straps as she pushed roughly at K'ile's chest. His shadowed form blurred until it merged with the rest of the tent, became nothing more than sun-tanned leather and sun-burned skin beneath her hands. Her heart clenched until she thought it might stop completely, the vice about her ribs threatening to shatter the thin bones. She'd known this would happen. She'd known, she'd known. She'd done nothing to stop it; K'ile Tia had not let her do anything to stop it. "She will come home to me!"

Twinflame · **04-18-2014, 11:08 PM**

"But she won't." K'ile bent forward as he was pulled on, and this seemed to dislodge the frustration in his voice. "She would come home to Airos or Thalen, but she disregarded you, didn't she? Or did I hear that wrong?" He tightened his hands over hers, as though he though she would pull away and was prepared to hold her in place. "I'm not trying to be cruel, but even if she were around -- which she isn't -- she'd be more likely to show herself to anyone else."

Naunet · **04-18-2014, 11:23 PM**

"You don't say that!" K'piru slammed her fists, still gripping the leather, against his chest, and her thoughts cursed K'ile Tia with the action. "She's my daughter! You--you don't get to say--" She squeezed her eyes shut, felt liquid fire trace burning tracks down her face. As she bowed forward, until her head rested against her forearms, K'piru felt the blow of the firedancer's words deep in her gut.

"She's my daughter," she hissed through teeth clenched against a roiling nausea. The words were thin, useless things, flung at the tia in a last ditch effort. She could see her daughter's small, red-furred form painted across the backs of her eyelids, felt the knife cuts of her words. "She'll come back to... she has to come back to me."

Twinflame · **04-18-2014, 11:31 PM**

"And if I don't say it, who will?" K'thalen Nunh would be too kind. That's why he was a Nunh, and the callous, secretly wicked K'ile Tia was the one who delivered the hard news, put the children in the racks, enforced exile. His heart was brittle from it, perhaps, but the loss of K'aijeen was not enough to break it. Nor, it seemed, was K'piru's pleading.

Because she needed this. The Tia tightened his features. "You've every right to mourn, but you can't leave the tribe over it. You have duties. You have your other daughters. There's nothing left to give up on. There is no daughter left to return to you."

Naunet · **04-18-2014, 11:45 PM**

Just a few days, she thought, begged silently, begged Azeyma. The goddess remained silent and shrouded from view, however, and K'ile Tia as relentless as ever. They'd not given K'aijeen enough time. She would return, and what would she do, what would she think if she found the tribe had moved on without her? It would be worse than what the racks did to her. Worse than...

K'piru's thoughts pushed about in her skull in a fragile state, shards of glass that cracked against one another and dug furrows in her brain. No daughter left. "Nothing," she breathed out, the word a question, an echo, and a denial all in one. K'aijeen's image reflected in her thoughts and she clung to it - not nothing, but her daughter. Her baby girl.

Her limbs lost their strength, grip slackening beneath K'ile's hands. A small, desperate part of her thought she could say no now, and sneak away, hide from the tribe without their knowing, and when she returned with K'aijeen, they would all know just how wrong they had been. But it would never end that way.

The firedancer was right.

No more words came to her then, only the silent heat down her face, the sand in her belly, the weight on her chest. She managed a nod of her head, and she felt the action like stab through the gut, a betrayal of her blood, her family. K'piru felt like a traitor to her daughter, but there was nothing else she could do. There was nothing else they could do.

Twinflame · **04-18-2014, 11:56 PM**

The woman seemed to wither in front of him. His hardened thoughts told him it looked like heat exhaustion, but he felt that it looked like bloodless. It looked like she was bleeding out and would soon die. There was an ironic streak of protectiveness in him that told him to defend K'piru from whatever was assailing her, even though it was he himself. How would he protect her from that?

Loosening his grip on her hands, K'ile said, "You should be with someone." But not with him, who didn't care for her loss, who only cared that she remain with the tribe. Truthfully, he was perhaps glad to have separated K'aijeen from K'piru and K'thalen, from their children. He had always envied his brother, and now he could do so without reservation. In his wicked heart, so obscured that he had not realized it until now, there was no part of his brother's life which he did not wish that he possessed.

Among them was the Nunh's ability to offer comfort, and he did not think it was a sin to envy at least that much. "I'll go find Thalen and tell him to attend to you. He'll be able to comfort you."

Naunet · **04-19-2014, 12:14 AM**

K'piru had no answer. She felt drained. She wanted to hate him for saying these things, for driving K'aijeen away. She wanted to hate K'aijeen for rejecting her every attempt to reach her, help her, teach her, for treating her family's love and generosity and understanding with reckless abandon. And most of all, she wanted to hate herself for giving in to those words, for hiding from her daughter when she must have needed her most, and now for giving up. For leaving her to be swallowed by the sands.

She wanted all these things, but for now, K'piru could only feel the suffocating shroud of grief. K'ile could send Thalen to her, but it wouldn't bring back her baby girl.

Twinflame · **04-19-2014, 12:39 AM**

K'ile Tia stepped back from the shaman. He still had instincts to comfort her, but he lacked the ability. He had come here to tell her that her daughter was dead, and he had convinced her of that. It was neither his place nor his talent to do anything more, even if he wished it otherwise.

There was still fire in his body as he moved back towards the tent's exist. It sparked in his heal as he rolled his food away from K'piru. It burned his fingertips as he let go of her hands. The fire roiled in his face and neck, chest and gut, as he turned away from her. He didn't want to leave. He hadn't wanted to hurt her, even though he knew that he would. The fire, therefore, was inevitable as a brush fire in summer, when the lightning storms come.

The fire wanted out of him. He couldn't comfort the shaman, but he could flee the tent. He could find the firedancers and pull them to their feet. K'ada would understand. She would light him ablaze herself if she got a hold of his tail while the stone on his wrist burned hot and bright as it did. If the firedancer didn't give the flame inside of him to a staff, to a dance, he felt that it would burst from his very bones.

K'ile pushed his way out of the tent without another word. He could at least take a moment to find K'thalen before he went in search of the firedancers.

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