None of this has happened. From the soul-crushing misery of the initial realisation has come...numbness. The gargoyle feels nothing - her heart is as stony as the grey of her coat. She cannot allow the hideous weight of emotion to explode through her, knowing it will be the most painful thing she's ever felt. So she chooses to feel nothing, simply blundering from the marsh to the Edge like she's drunk, stumbling over stones and twigs that she would normally have avoided with ease. Beside her is Tembovu in his elephant form, carrying the prone, limp body of her mother. That's the bit she finds so hard to believe - the mare that made her, birthed her, fed her, raised her, is just a corpse now. Just meat. Death has never affected her before, especially when she uses it as a vessel to fuel her shapeshifting magic, but she knows the finality of it now. Wherever her mother is, she's not in that empty husk of a body.

She carries Dominus' corpse herself. There is no way she is separating her mother from her long-time companion, not when she knows the abyss that would be left if anything happened to Ker. The lion's weight against her back makes her quiver with exertion, but she revels in each laboured step, knowing that she deserves the ache of every last one.

Finally she reaches the Edge. Her path takes her through the familiar territory, through trees and grass until she reaches the lush pastures that slope away to the sheer cliff. It is here that she chooses; here that seems an apt place to lay her mother to rest. With the dawn sunlight breaking across the cliffs and chasing away the last of the fog, illuminating every blade of grass in sharp relief, the yearling cannot think of anywhere more beautiful for Nyx to rest. She can look out to the endless sea on one side, or watch the herd go about their business on the other, and Oizys fights back a choking sob as she gently lowers Dominus' body to the ground. Ker quickly replaces the missing warmth of the lion's carcass, twining her beak around Oizys' onyx mane and offering comfort wherever she can.

A grave. She needs to dig a grave. She feels it should be her who digs, given that it was her who has caused all this, so she slowly reaches around and grabs one of the glass phials forged for her by the Glaziers. It is filled with bear's blood, and with a groan she swallows the viscous liquid and triggers the transformation. Bones snap audibly and each muscle rips as she shifts from filly into bear, and she shuts her eyes and revels in each ounce of agony as it sears through her.

As soon as a great grizzly bear stands where the gargoyle had done seconds before, she begins to dig. Her massive forepaws scrabble at the ground, the claws carving easily through the loamy soil and flicking out any errant pebbles in her path. Her shoulders soon scream for mercy and her forelegs ache with exertion, but she grits her sharp teeth against the pain and digs until she can't think of anything else but this physical punishment, this biblical task that she deserves to suffer from.