Even though many hours had passed since the horrible ordeal had ended, she hadn’t been able to stop crying. Though those who saw the melancholy darling might have thought her weeping due to the many hundred, blistered ant bites all across her pretty, cream pelt, but, in fact, it was only partially so. While the painful pinches surely hurt, inside her heart, a deeper hurt had welled up, and Maude wasn’t sure how to make it subside.

Floating among ash and ember, the falling Queen rises to mind over and over, and how the once vengeful ants had somberly carried her home. It was all so cruel! She wanted to go back to the Dark Forest and find the spiders to crush them, one after the other, but that dark imagining made her shudder mid-step, and her silent weeping barks roughly with the emotional turmoil that such darkness inspires. How awful of her, to think that way…

She’s just angry, that’s all it is! Dwelling on more pain and sadness won’t make it better, even she knows it, but it’s the stupid spider’s fault the pretty Queen is dead!

Sniffling and occasionally moaning, the bereaved and ant assaulted child arrives with a still damp mane and tail at the gate back into the Edge, glumly making her way towards Trewdwellan. The closer she gets, the more she discovers her eyes well with tears, and soon, she’s mostly blindly making her way down familiar trails, her heart the heaviest it’s ever been.

Even when mommy was lost, Maude had still had hope; hope she was alive, and well, hope that she would come home, and share stories with her again. There was no hope for the Ant Queen, not if she was dead, and there was no hope for her children, either, because the golden woman had taken the Queen’s magic with her. The child surely hoped, for the ant’s sake, that they had another shimmery, blue aura down there to protect them the next time a bunch of foolish horses were tricked into murder.

"D-daddy?" she quietly whimpers and snuffles as their family clearing surrounds her, glancing this way and that for her russet father, hoping his healing magic can at least alleviate the physical pain bereaving her, and also that his words might ease the ache in her chest.

[ OOC: The family is of course welcome. <3 Otherwise for Tilney to heal Maude up! ]
MaudeHow should we like it if the stars were to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
let the more loving one be me.