Blacktail Deer Plateau Who would've thought that you'd be bad for my health?

@Osprey !

Saena was seated at the edge of the plateau with her slim snout pointed to the sky overhead. The clouds seemed somehow heavier than normal, with fluffy extensions reaching down toward the ground. It wasn't the same haze that rain usually gave the sky, but resembled reaching fingers that dissipated at the tips. Saena didn't have enough experience to know what they signaled, but if she'd been a bit older, she'd have recognized them as snow clouds.

Winter was an instinct for wolves. They instinctively fattened up, instinctively grew longer fur, and instinctively knew how to deal with the cold. She knew it was coming because she felt it in her heart of hearts, where only the wildest of instincts lived. Yet she was apprehensive of its coming. It was natural for all young wolves to feel nervous about the coming winter as the adults busied themselves with preparation; none of them knew what to expect.

She sniffed the air in a vain hope to put her interest in Naturalism to work, detecting a faint whiff of what could only be called "icy".

If few weeks ago Osprey had been hoarding things in her den because of stress, which had been caused by Peregrine's sudden departure, now she was focused on finding food - every scrap counted, because the hunger she felt was hard to satisfy. Therefore this morning she had been out in the wilds once again and been lucky enough to hunt down a whole hare and eating it whole, leaving only few bones and scraps of fur lying on the ground. After a nap at her den, she left it to have a stroll and if luck would have it - find something more to eat. Winter was coming and from her experience you never knew, where extra fat reserves would come in handy.

After a while finding scent of several wolf-tracks, but meeting no people directly, she spotted a cream-colored she-wolf seated at the edge of the plateau. Her coloring was unusual, therefore it wasn't hard for Osprey to recognize Saena - another one of the little batch of relatives she had not yet got to know. She approached her carefully and stopped, when she had come near enough to be seen and heard. "Hey," she greeted her. "What's the sky telling you?"

No matter how hard she tried, Saena couldn't pull the memory of this scent out of the corners of her mind. She knew it, and yet couldn't remember ever smelling it. She was still surveying the sky when footsteps announced someone behind her. Her ears twisted back automatically as the prickling feeling of being watched shimmied up her back, but when the stranger spoke, the voice was familiar.

She'd spent almost no time in Osprey's company. Her aunt was a face in the crowd to Saena, but she remembered that voice from the meeting Peregrine had called before abandoning them all. She was the only other wolf who had denounced Peregrine for his rash decision and for putting Fox first. Saena turned slowly on the spot to regard Osprey openly; it was nice knowing someone was on her team.

"Not sure," she said, glancing at the sky and then back. "It smells weird, doesn't it? It's like I know the smell but... I've never actually smelled it before." The scent of ice on the air was peculiar after all. "Do you know what it might be?"

The girl turned to face her immediately and Osprey finally had a chance to see her little relative's (since the exact level of their relation was hard to determine and name) face. Saena's coloring had always striked curiosity in her, because it was very unusual in so many ways. None of this came from Redleaf lines, so it must have been from someone her older sister Velox had mixed together with. A unique one though.

"Really?" Osprey's ears perked up, she moved from her spot and came to stand by Saena's side. She had expected a more cryptical answer, yet the deal was more simple. Smells weren't that hard to decode. She craned her neck forward and sniffed the air, testing various scent particles, each of them bringing tons of new information. Yet none of them seemed unique or out of ordinary. Done scanning she eyed the young girl thoughtfully and then asked: "Can you describe it? When you smell it, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?"

When prompted to describe the smell as Osprey settled herself, Saena frowned thoughtfully. She didn't think she had the words to adequately describe it. She stretched her neck forward and inhaled deeply once more, drawing that crisp, cold scent into her nostrils and snagging her lower lip between her teeth and contemplating a way to tell Osprey what she smelled.

She could come up with nothing concrete, though, so Saena shrugged and pulled her head back. "It just smells weird," she said, "but... familiar. It's like... all the other smells are duller, and it smells sort of... metallic?" Her ears wilted back. Metallic wasn't the word she'd been looking for at all, but it was the closest comparison she could think of. The smell of ice on the wind was one for which words didn't exist, as Saena was regrettably learning.

What Osprey tended to forget, when she was having a conversation with juveniles was that they weren't grown ups yet and therefore lacked experience, which seemed all too obvious to the older wolf. Therefore she couldn't guess, what Saena was sensing. Metallic? She frowned, then turned her gaze away, closed her eyes and sniffed the air. Once again her nostrils were filled with various scent particles - moist earth, dust, water, pine-trees, rotting leaves... She scanned for the metallic, but found none that would match that description.

"No luck for me," Osprey gave up after few more minutes of effort and shrugged. "I guess it is a specific smell only you can sense. Velox - my older sister and your grandmother - was good and catching smells by the way," she shared a bit of the family history, even though this was one of the few pieces of her memory that she could connect to her sister, who she hadn't seen for years.

Saena's shoulders slumped when Osprey reported no detection of a metallic scent. It would elude her for today, but eventually the juvenile would discover its origin. It would only take until the snow fell, after all. She smiled a little woefully and said, "well, can't be dangerous then," before Osprey revealed something to Saena that made her head whip around much faster than it should have.

"What'd you say?" asked the pale female, almost a little more sharply than she meant to. Without pausing to apologize, the juvenile bounced to her feet and said, "my grandmother's your sister?" Up until now, Saena had believed that she was sort of an adoptive member of the Redleaf-DiSarinno family, yet here was Osprey giving her information that suggested she was, in fact, a true blue member.

She was much too excited by this news—and the fact that she really was like a niece to Osprey, and Junior and Tytonidae were closer to being her sisters than she'd ever imagined—to say anything about Velox's tracking skills.

Osprey wasn't aware that there might have been things that Peregrine hadn't explained to his adoptive children - she had always considered that both Saena and Pura knew, who their mother was and to whom she had been related to, therefore girl's surprise surprised Osprey even more. And she stared at her expression, trying to understand, what the true emotions were - was she happy or disappointed? Was she angry or in a disbelief? Because Osprey had no desire to continue the conversation, if it had a prospect of turning out unpleasant.

Saena seemed curious, therefore her "sort of aunt" relaxed and explained: "Your mother - Pied - was a daughter to Velox, who was my older sister. This makes you a... niece-niece or something to me?" She didn't have a word for such complicated being-related to someone business. "I am few years younger, therefore I didn't see much of Velox, but yeah... you are part of the DiSarinno-Redleaf family on your mother's side."

Throughout Osprey's brief explanation of family ties, Saena made soft "ohs" and "ahs" of understanding. Her curiosity about her family was formerly limited to her deceased mother. She'd never actually met a grandparent, so she'd never thought to ask about them, though in hindsight it was rather silly not to wonder who Peregrine's and Pied's parents were.

Her attention was wholly on Osprey now as she asked, bright-eyed, "is our family large?" She imagined it was small, just Peregrine, Atticus, Osprey, Velox, their parents... she didn't know about Crete, or that her great grandmother was a rather notorious potty mouth, or that there were countless relatives on her family tree, or that the Redleafs were truly just a branch off the DeMonte tree (which Saena knew nothing about).

"It's huge," Osprey replied, having no better word to describe her branched and complicated family tree. Her mother and father had had a litter every spring for several consecutive years, at least half of them had wandered off in the world, found mates and cooked up more babies. So, if someone decided to make a big family reunion somewhere, he or she would need a lot of space and patience. Too many Redleaf-DiSarinno's at the same place definitely meant trouble.

"It's complicated - your great-grandmother, who is my and Perry's mom - March owl had many children. And your great-grandfather Aether - came from an ancient, vast and almost royal family. So... if you looked hard enough, you would find a distant relative almost everywhere," it was suddenly a bit frightening prospect of realizing that there were so many wolves in her family that she didn't know yet. "Besides - don't forget that your grandpa - Starbuck - and father - Kisu - definitely have families too. So... all in all... you are not a lonely leaf - you are a part of a very big, very branched, very strong family tree."

"Wow," said Saena as the full breadth of of her family's expansive tree was laid out before her. Her father was just one of perhaps dozens of siblings, and her great grandmother and great grandfather had extensive ties, if what Osprey said could be believed. She could only imagine several hundred roots jutting out from there, the children of her aunts and uncles, the children of their children, a thousand tiny lights on the wolfish globe comprising the entire Redleaf family. It was truly unfathomable.

"Ah, I don't... call Kisu my dad," she said suddenly. "He never acted like a dad or even told us for a long time, y'know, and he just sorta left one day. Cared even less about me and my brother than... well, you know." For some reason, she was hesitant to say anything too poor about Peregrine to his sister. What she'd been about to say wasn't in the least bit true, but Saena felt the evidence was enough to conclude it. She didn't need to consider other perspectives because, of course, her experiences were the best representative in her opinion.

"That's comforting to know, though," said Saena at last, smiling to herself. "I always thought Pura and I were sort of just... misfits." Arguably, Pura was a misfit in every way; no amount of family ties could make him less unusual. Saena was less so, and felt far better knowing she had more than just Kisu, Pura, and Pied in her family tree.

Osprey had caught glance of Kisu from afar, but hadn't had a face-to-face conversation with him. At that time she had been busy getting used to the new circumstances in her life and had focused less on what had been going around her in the pack. From bits and pieces of information Peregrine had spilled, she could pull together an image of a not so happy family picture - Pied dead, Kisu estranged and children orphaned. "They say that anyone can become a father, but it takes a lot of work to be called "dad"," she remarked with a sad smile, summarizing Saena's opinion about her creator. It was a pity that she didn't have a constant father figure in her life like Aether had been for Osprey and her siblings. Having a good and dedicated father meant a lot.

She caught the notion about Peregrine and his departure - she had come to terms with this, however this clearly had affected Saena deeply and was still a touchy subject. "Well, he couldn't be that bad. Whenever I am angry at someone I tend to remind myself all the good things this person has done and not judge him by the one thing, where he made a mistake," she said, wondering, if she had sounded too judging. "I understand that you are upset with him and rightly so, but life goes on and I know my brother - his decisions might not always be the right ones, but he never gives up on his family."

He couldn't be that bad, said Osprey, and Saena thought she was referring to Kisu. She opened her mouth, a protest hot on her lips, when finally she realized who her aunt was talking about. Knowing it was Peregrine didn't make it any better, though. Saena's lips formed a thin, hard line as she listened, though she didn't want to. There was nothing and no one who could make her think better for her father and his decisions, not even his sister.

"Yeah, right," she said absently, slowly getting to her feet and turning back toward the forest. "I don't believe that. He wouldn't have abandoned us if he didn't give up on family, he'd have asked us to go with him. He doesn't care about his family, only who's fucking him." Realizing how crude and disgusting this sounded coming from a juvenile, Saena muttered a quick, "I gotta go," and beat a hasty retreat, unwilling to give Osprey an opportunity to berate her for her harsh, out of line tone.

Osprey's words hadn't reached Saena, judging by the sudden change in her attitude towards the conversation. She wanted to remind her that Peregrine had, in fact, offered anyone, who wished so, to follow him and that it had been entirely their choices to stay behind. Instead she looked like someone, who had been taken by surprise and hit hard in the face. With ears drawn back, she looked away from the girl - feeling hurt - and yet her mind tried to reason all of this at the same time. The girl was still young, she wasn't to blame, that she would get over it, learn to accept, what had happened, and see it from a different perspective. But with all of this the pain didn't go away.

She didn't turn to see the girl leave and kept her gaze focused at the distant horizon, silent tears brimming from her eyes.