More and more, every year, it felt like life was slipping Cashiss by.She had joined Dreamer's Glass to be with a handsome stallion she had very much admired, but Odysseus was gone now, as well as Cressida. Penelope was off in her own herd, and Telemash wandered around doing...what exactly did her son do, anyway...?
Telemash was easily her child most likely to visit her, and usually the only relative she ever saw. He had a life of his own, she knew; he had a charming mate named Pyry, they had three children of her own, but it seemed like ever since he got a new family of his own, he had been visiting less and less. She'd hardly seen any of her grandkids, for crying out loud, and she should've been able to imagine their faces every time she thought of them, and she did not!
Honestly, her own indignation at that amused her. She had never wanted to be a grandmother. She'd never wanted to be old and old-fashioned, and both of those things had seemed integral to being a grandmother. But then she had met Alatie, Mythris, and Mitnaes, and now she relished the idea of being a grandmother. She supposed it was a lot like her experience with her children. She had always dreaded being a mother for much the same reasons she had dreaded being a grandmother (though not nearly as much, of course). And yet, once she had been pregnant, she had welcomed the idea; once they were born, she was completely on board with it and despite her usual pacifism she knew she would defend her children to the death. She couldn't help it--she loved her descendants, all six of them, and she wished she could see them all more often.
Cashiss flicked her ears as she heard a sound off in the woods. The birds were still singing, so it was nothing threatening, but she was still curious. She shrank down into her tiny butterfly form and flitted through the trees towards the sound. She had to know what it was before it saw her--how else would she know how to react, and if she was presentable enough to be seen? Appearance was very important to Cashiss, almost as much as her family was. And the fact that there would ever be anything more important than her own looks was even more startling than everything else combined.
