She was growing numb.

It wasn't just that she couldn't cry over him any more, it was something else. As if all these days, weeks, gods maybe even months spent wallowing in tragedy has seeming drained her; a body cut open and left to bleed out, but it was her heart and soul instead. In all of her lifetime, Ampere had never run out of emotions- she was always adrift in a tidal wave of them, rough and haphazard and dangerous because of them. Now she was driftwood, growing stale among the sand and the salted breezes- cold, hard, brittle.

Numb wasn't dead though.
Broken didn't mean useless.

She still had something, buried deep down under all the seafoam and debris.
Her kids.

The call shriek that Tae unleashed pierced Ampere down into her core, where that something still lived. Half asleep as she was laying in the sands, the mother leapt swiftly to her hooves at that sound, its roar still in her veins, utterly alert and already on the move. Unsure what exactly was happening, but knowing her daughters didn't often need her, especially not with such urgency, Ampere knew it wasn't good. Her limbs churned hungrily through the sands, eager to close the gap between her and the sound of her troubled child; in doing so she abandoned the youngest one to his slumber.

"TAE!" Grus- the name died on her tongue as she spied her daughter, swerving in for a hot descent, the sand nearly glass on her heels. Ampere halted abruptly, her head thrown back by the quickness of it as Tae whipped around, a shout still there on her lips despite their proximity. "What!" Ampere gasped, her 'brows stretching up in sympathetic panic.

Kygo, alerted to all this drama by the sudden influx of rampaging feelings between their bond, flew down from his perch in a nearby tree, echoing his discontent with the frenzied mares in an endless and pointless stream of chatter. He stayed above, mindful of the pups below, his shadow skirting circles around them.

"What," Ampere breathed out again as Tae managed to get a more sensible explanation out. "It's alright, we'll find it" she murmured with a calm patience born of experience with this task. She extended a wing to wrap around Tae in comfort, to soothe her beating heart and the fires it stoked.

"I lost one of my knives once, you know," she said after a moment, paused on thought as she debated sharing her shame. "I was furious, searching everywhere I had been as of late to no avail. I'd thought it gone, but a friend had found it for me." She hummed faintly to herself, the memory flickering behind her eyes.

Her gaze cleared as she shook her head, returning to Tae. "When did you first notice?" have you already looked where you were last? she wanted to ask, but decided not to insinuate Tae wouldn't have. One thing she was sure of about this girl- she was smart and more than capable, and she wasn't a girl any more, Ampere was steadily realizing. When had she gotten this tall? When did she grow up?

Pulling back, Ampere's magic yanked her blade from its sheath by her wing. "The whatching shift goes ever one," she intoned, a blue eye scouring the steel viewing plane as she tilted it back and forth to spy across the Halcyon Flats. "We'll fine it, whatever it takes."

A M P E R E
PRETTY FACE AND ELECTRIC SOUL