It had started yesterday. After Revon, Kyna had thought she’d known what to expect – pain increasing slowly and then all at once, everything intense, excruciating and awful. And that’s how it started. Slow. Spasms of pain, but not enough to bother anyone, and certainly not enough to go hide away. It felt better to move, to walk, to get up and shift. To have a cold drink of water or bask in the afternoon sun. But it didn’t change.
She retreated to the den she’d carved out when she had Revon a year ago (as she’d done for the past week or so, now so large that she could barely sleep more than a few hours at a time and unwilling to bother the rest of her pack), sure the pups would come soon. But they didn’t. The sun fell and the moon rose and nothing changed. Kyna drifted off into uneasy sleep – and was awoken in the wee hours by that horrible, awful pain that could mean nothing else.
She did not call, she did not do anything else.
It went all morning – so early afternoon rolled around and Kyna finally summoned her mate and her daughter. “It seemed Revon was right, after all,” she hummed tiredly once her family had arrived. Not one pup, but three. Three! And all boys, no less.
Perhaps she wasn’t as much like her mother as she thought.
And – the middle one, with his beautiful greying coat – he looked like her father. Perhaps when his eyes opened… It made tears prickle at the corner of her eyes. One like Greer, one like Phineas, and one not so different from herself and Revon. A perfect trio. The Argyris lineage would live.