He's gone. He's gone and she doesn't know what to do. Promises mean nothing to her when they've come from the teeth of liars before. When she has lied so much herself, and made people believe it. The child - children? - in her womb have no knowledge of the darkness and the hell that she has seen. That they will see. That their mother had wielded without care or consequence. And she will raise them at her side with viperous tongues and power in their voices. Because it is the only defense she knows how to give her unborn children, the only armor she can supply them. She'd rather them live jaded and cruel than innocent and hurting. 

But even as a mother with three children - two bloodless - to her name, she is a failure of one. She knows now how hard it must have been on her own mother, dealing with two opposing forces such as she and Raeden. Her regret for her childish actions has never been stronger than when she faces a road of maternal failure a fourth time. There is no shoulder to lean her head upon, nobody to confide in that lay within the faces upturned towards her. Ashamin is gone and she is directionless, her faith shaken. 

She goes to her parents. 

Their souls are long departed, no wisdom can be offered by their voices. There is no physical body to press herself against, no scent to calm her nerves and wild emotions. There is only the cool bark of a tree that grows unnaturally, boughs budding with new life just as her own body does. Intertwined trunks that remind her of a love that had transcended death itself. Her parents had loved chaotically, passionately. Nothing had stopped their union, not forever. Hotaru tries to take strength in the tales they had passed down to her, a cold replacement for the lives she'd never been able to witness on her own. 

Her back is suffering the laborious effort of a child too large for her small body, and it is why she suspects twins on the horizon. Alice helps lower her to the snowy earth between the majestic roots, her warm fur a further comfort in the cold morning. One pale cheek touches the bark beneath her, staring aimlessly into the distance as she imagines what trials motherhood will bring her this time. 

She only prays her parents - their souls - will guide and watch over her. It's the only sentimentality she will allow herself, this solitary headstone the Gods have granted her. Few even know what the tree means or why it grows. So Hotaru will lay beneath the boughs of her parents' love, because she is incapable of laying between the warm press of their bodies. And she will seek wisdom where she never has before, because even a Queen has weaknesses, ones she must conceal. Her children will always be one of them. 

OOC thingies here