Wolf RPG

Things felt weird around the Rise. Reek and Saena had only been back a couple of hours when the hawks disappeared completely and eerie silence descended over the ridge. Although she was no longer practiced, Saena was a naturalist by trade, and so her first instinct was to climb to the highest point of their quaint territory and search the sky for telltale signs.

Of course, a wolf doesn't always experience a tornado in their life and she wasn't bestowed with magical knowledge of that. The clouds overhead were very heavy and thick, mottled dark, and the sky was a strange ochre colour, like dust had been kicked up into it. From this height she could feel humidity hanging over her. But the birds in the forest made no sound and it unsettled Saena.

A huge storm was coming. That much the naturalist could tell. It was heading... well, she wasn't sure which direction. The clouds were moving unpredictably in the far distance. Not quite a swirl, and yet... not the straight line that a normal wind would suggest. Curious, thought the naturalist as she seated herself to watch the roiling sky to the south.

The lively jokester had all but vanished from Arion; these days, he was uncharastically reserved and silent. He became even more stoic than before, coldly analyzing everyone and everything around him and when he spoke, he usually spoke in a manner that was either too polite (for him) or sharply critical. He was mercilessly cold nowadays, as if an icy wind had blown through him and chilled all the former warmth. It wasn't like he had been particularly personable before, but at least some still thought him as a pleasant and humorous wolf to be around; nowadays, none of his likeable characteristics seemed to be around.

Reek and Saena's scents were fresh upon the borders as the stallion descended from the ridge for a patrol, but the moment he smelled their scents, the Greek turned around and began making his way back up to the top where he might be able to spot them. He didn't particularly want to see them, but still wished to check up on them to see if they were alright and to know what happened on the journey. Did they meet any of the southerners? Did they encounter trouble?

Arion didn't have to search long; quickly spotting Saena's form on the highest point of their territory. The stallion silently made his way towards where she was and stopped beside her, impassive golden eyes fixed on the horizon. He was in no way a naturalist, never having the patience to study these 'mundane' things or fill his hard drive (his brain) with meaningless information that would not benefit him in any way in his work. But he too, sensed something was terribly wrong.

Thick and dark clouds were strewn heavily across the strangely colored sky, the air was humid and the birds in the forest below made no sound which was high unusual and signified that something, most likely something terrible, was about to happen. It felt like the entire Teekon Wilds was holding its breath, waiting for it, whatever it was, to happen. And Arion was one of them, waiting with bated breath for the storm to rage upon them.

"Something's going to happen," Arion murmured, though whether it was directed to Saena or to himself remained unknown. "I can feel it."

She didn't know how long she sat there before Arion arrived, but by then, Saena had predicted the course of the storm. She broke her train of thought and put it aside when the burly warrior stepped up alongside her, though, and her eyes went to him instead of the tossing clouds in the distance. He voiced her own concerns and she nodded gravely. Something was coming and they needed to be ready for it.

"See," Saena said, gesturing toward the massing clouds in the south. "There's something weird about those. They aren't moving right. It's like they're all... bubbling or something." If she was closer, the naturalist would've compared it to a slow churning whirlpool, but from here she couldn't make that out clearly. "It's a storm, a big one. I don't know what those clouds are all about, but it's something bad. Hail, maybe?" She was far off, but it was the best guess Saena had. A tornado was unheard of. Literally. She'd never heard of it before.

"But I don't think it'll hit us directly. We might just get a lot of rain. It'll be hard for it to pass the mountain." In Saena's limited experience, storms weren't great at getting over mountains. Maybe the Sunspire range would save them from a direct encounter with that monstrous storm. "But it'll still be bad for us even if it isn't the worst of it."

A chocolate brown ear flicked towards Saena's direction as she spoke, saying that there was something weird about the clouds, that they were bubbling. Arion's golden eyes shifted towards the clouds. Yes, there was something definitely weird about them, something that he, despite his extensive knowledge, did not know about. He had never seen such a thing before, and his father hadn't either. None of the wolves he met knew anything about these...bubbling clouds, so he was left in the dark. Which was something he did not like.

"Yeah," he murmured his agreement. "Never seen such a thing before, but it sure as hell ain't good," Arion would not look forward to the storm, but neither did he wish it would come later. No good would come from waiting. From his experience, a storm that waited and came later than expected would be a storm that was far worse than what could have been if it had came earlier and that had been a mild storm. This one, by the looks of it, would be terrible.

"It'll be bad for us," he repeated, golden eyes still fixed at the distant horizon. Worry brewed beneath his breast, followed by nervousness and anxiety. However, he managed to conceal his emotions, not wanting to show them to his leader just yet.

Arion, as always, was to the point about his thoughts. Saena appreciated that about him. There was no dancing around an issue, no tricks, no confusion with words. He stated the way she felt about the storm brewing on the horizon: it's ugly. Saena, and indeed any animal worth its hide, didn't need to be a weather expert to know that it was dangerous. The quiet on the airwaves was foreboding enough to tell that tale, plain as day.

"We'll make sure the pack gets to safety," Saena told him. She trusted Arion to help with this, though all it should take was a howl. He was beta quality and lately she and Reek had been treating him like it, as she did now. "The movement of surrounding clouds tells me it's going to the coast. We should shelter in case it rains, but we should otherwise be okay."

She swallowed and silently added, I think.

Arion was pulled out of his thoughts when Saena spoke to him, saying that 'we' would make sure the pack gets to safety. An amused smile tugged at the corner of the chocolate warrior's lips, and he turned his head to shoot his leader a glance. "We?" he asked, his tone amused and shook his head. The stallion was only a packmate after all, a subordinate. Sure, he was Gamma, at the top of the subordinates but in the end, that was all he was. A subordinate.

"You don't need to locate all the members of the pack and tell them the news personally. No Redtail wolf is stupid. All you or Reek have to do his howl a message, and the pack will get it. 'We' ain't doing nothing, you know." Saena and Reek were going to do all the necessary leadership work, getting packmates to safety, yada yada yada. Arion, on the other hand, as a subordinate, would only hear the howl and retreat to his den.

Arion was perceptive enough to know that Reek and Saena were treating him like he was the Beta of the Rise. He wasn't stupid, in fact, that was the last thing he was. The Greek simply didn't care about that, he didn't give a rat's ass on what they thought because it wasn't official. So until it was official, Arion was going to do the work of a subordinate, and a subordinate only. He found it unfair for them to be treating him like he was supposed to do that kind of job, but did not find it fit to officially name him. That was stupid. Arion only did these things if there were benefits to it. He weighted the advantages and the disadvantages and chose his best option. They should know. They knew him long enough to know that he only did what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.

Arion offered his leader a non-committal shrug to her next words of the pack being okay. There was nothing else to say.

She'd expected Arion to help, as he always had before, but instead he came back with attitude. Saena frowned at him, momentarily distracted from the storm brewing on the horizon. She'd thought he would like being treated like a leader—the point being that his promotion was imminent, the point being that they were ensuring he was capable of it before giving him the official name—but she was apparently wrong, for he was content to remind her that she and Reek need only howl, and that he wasn't part of it, or so he seemed to imply. She meant to howl to the pack to warn them, but as an alpha who cared about her pack, she didn't intend to spare the effort to ensure their safety.

"Okay," she said, her tone a little short, "I will make sure everyone gets to safety and you can sit here on your ass." Her impatience was probably unwarranted, but lately Arion had turned into a hothead and she sure as shit didn't appreciate it. It hadn't been aimed at her until now, but the change in his tune was unwelcome. In fact, if he wasn't careful about how he spoke to her and Reek in the future and if he continued his strange turn of disrespect, he would probably find himself homeless faster than he would find himself a beta, which was sort of the intent.

"What the fuck's your problem lately, anyway?" the alpha asked, feeling heated and ready to confront him about it. His blow-up at Reek was almost intolerable enough, but since it didn't involve her, Saena hadn't done anything about it. His apparent unwillingness to help her with this crucial task was another story. Of course, what Arion said here was very tame compared to what he'd said to the alpha male, but Saena was feeling all sorts of things—unease, anxiety, frustration—and those all compounded together to make Arion's tone hit harder than it really should have.

Had Arion helped with the leading pairs before? Had he helped them when there were no advantages to it? If he had, he did not remember it at all. But nevermind that, that didn't really matter. Because surely they didn't expect him to keep helping them when there were clearly no benefits to doing so, surely they knew him better than that. They seemed to have another image of him in their minds, they seemed to have made him into someone he was not: another one of their normal subordinates. Arion didn't follow them blindingly, he didn't do anything simply because he was loyal. Sure, he was loyal, and he loved them all, but that wasn't the point. The point was, none of that mattered to him in the end. Loyalty, love, trust...none of that mattered. In the end, he weighed his options and chose the side that benefited him the most. In the end, he was his own man.

At least, that was what he thought. In reality? Even the chocolate stallion didn't know, though he did try to force himself to believe what he thought himself to be: a calculating wolf that was always on the side that benefited him the most. A wolf that was his own man through and through.

Arion blinked, taking himself back to reality as Saena replied curtly. Saying that she would make sure everyone gets to safety while he could sit here on his ass. What? What had he done to get her pissed off and annoyed? Did he say something wrong? He had only been stating his thoughts, just as he always had. What was wrong with her. Arion opened his mouth then closed it, deciding not to voice his no doubt insensitive thoughts and make this worse. But honestly, the stallion didn't understand how her brain worked. He hadn't even said anything particularly bad. Gods, he would never understand wolf nature.

Saena's next words made Arion even more confused. He blinked, straightened himself and turned to look at her, golden eyes inscrutable and revealing none of his confusion or thoughts. What was his problem? What was her fucking problem? He had no problem. He had been exactly how he was, he was still the Arion at the founding of Redtail Rise. He hadn't changed, he didn't have problems. She and Reek had, they had acquired some kind of problem, not him.

"I don't have a problem," Arion stated, allowing some of his confusion to show through his tone. "Perhaps it's the lack of Poppy," the stallion lifted a shoulder in a shrug. Maybe poppy was the problem, after all, it kind of acted like a sedative to the eccentric warrior and now that he couldn't have it... "Or maybe I didn't have enough time to blow off steam," his nonexistent brows creased in a frown for a moment, before vanishing into his normal stoic look once more.

"Yeah, you do," Saena pressed, incensed as she was. Maybe she should've left it alone. After all, driving Arion away and creating a rift was the last thing the alpha female wanted to do. But whatever he was keeping pent up inside him was changing him, or so it appeared to her, and she was tired of it. She was tired of aggression, especially within her pack, and she was tired of non-compliance, and tired of feeling like she bent over backward for those who didn't give a fuck. Okay, that was pretty harsh—Arion had never indicated that he didn't give a fuck, but nor had he agreed to help her now—but she wasn't pleased.

"Threatening to leave the pack all of a sudden for mysterious reasons," she cited, "and I know you freaked out at Reek too, and I thought you would've helped me with this." She took a deep breath. "That's not the Arion I know and respect." She almost said "you're not," but chose a less accusatory word instead. She had to keep in mind that she didn't want him to feel necessarily attacked, but he had to realize he wasn't the same anymore, and he had to know she knew it.

"Whether it's poppy or blowing off steam or whatever caused it," she finished, "figure it out. You're not going to make a good beta if you keep acting like that."

Annoyance and irritation flared up sharply in Arion when Saena insisted that it was him who had the problem. Was she blind? Couldn't she see that he was still the Greek of the founding of Redtail Rise? He hadn't changed; Saena had. Wait. He had forgotten his leader was still a teenager. A yearling who hadn't had much experience with the world yet. However much ambitious, courageous and brilliant Saena was, in the end, she would still fall prey to youthful idiocies. Arion should never have forgotten that. He chastised himself internally while kept his stoic countenance. "Whatever helps you sleep at night," he muttered.

Chocolate brown ears pricked when Saena began ticking things off her 'Arion has problems' list. She began by saying that he 'threatened' to leave the pack all of a sudden for mysterious reasons. He snorted at that, and a dark scowl appeared on his usually sarcastic features. Arion no longer looked like the joke loving jester - no, now something else had taken over. "I didn't threaten to leave," he said with an eerie sense of calmness. "Nor would it have been all of a sudden. If you and Reek hadn't been too busy doing other more important things, you would have noticed that something was different with my demeanor." Arion straightened himself. "I wasn't threatening to leave," he repeated. "I would have left if you hadn't come. That's not threatening to do something, is it?"

The stallion sighed and resisted the urge to start pacing. Why should he resist the urge? There was no reason to do such a thing. So he began pacing; back and forth, back and forth without regard of what Saena thought. But Arion did not say what he so desperately wanted to say in reply to her comment about 'freaking out at Reek': That motherfucker deserved every second of it. Instead, he lifted a shoulder in a shrug. "Have you ever put yourself in my paws?" he asked quietly. If she had, and still didn't understand, then that meant she didn't know him at all. And if that was his family, then shit. Ain't nothing tying him here anymore. Even his aloof older brother Krios was better than that.

She also thought he would help him with this tornado thing. At that, Arion's scowl deepened and he began pacing faster than ever, surely carving a trail in the ground. So she didn't know him as well as the chocolate warrior thought. Saena still thought that he was under her control, that he was one of her wolves. Didn't she know?! Didn't they know?! He did what he wanted to do whenever he wanted to do it. He did things only after he weighted his options He didn't blindly follow others like the normal wolf subordinates did. He wasn't one of them.

Arion didn't give a fuck if now he wasn't the Arion that she knew and respect. He wasn't going to change himself for her. Who did she think he was, hmm?! Things had gotten too far here. They were beginning to assume that he was someone he was not. Well, she better get used to this. Because he ain't changing anytime soon. "Maybe the Arion you know wasn't the Arion I am," the stallion retorted sharply, tilting his head up and glancing at the darkening sky as he did so. The storm would be coming soon.

Like hell he was going to listen to her orders. Arion was not going to figure his so called 'problem' out just because this teenager told him to. He might have done so if she hadn't pursued it in first place. But now, he decided that he purposely would not just to prove his point. The point that Saena would probably never know. "Okay," he said with a shrug, the faintest trace of his usual smirk evident on his fine features. "But for now...I have to leave. The storm's coming and I gotta go back to my den." With that, Arion dipped his head in an almost imperceptible nod, turned and began making his way in a confidently nonchalant manner towards the cave he currently stayed in, whistling softly as he moved. If wolves could walk with their paws in their pockets, Arion would have done so.

The more Arion spoke, the narrower the alpha female's eyes grew. By his admission, she ought to know what was going on, but it wasn't like she had time to hang out with him every day in order to figure it out herself. She relied on her followers to be open with her and right now, Arion was being anything but that. She only grew more confused when he asked if she'd put herself in his shoes.

"Maybe I could do that if you'd talk to me about your issues," she emphasized in a tone that was now growing irate. She'd asked Arion what was wrong when he'd first threatened (call it what he liked, it was still a threat in her eyes) to leave the pack and he had refused to tell her. He still refused, and yet expected her to somehow understand how he felt. Well, Saena might be capable of seeing and communing with spirits, but she was no mind-reader and she wouldn't pretend to be sorry that she'd not seen the signs or sorry that he felt slighted because of it. There was only so much she could do when someone refused to tell her what was up.

"I'm sorry that grieving for my sister and fortifying our borders and getting rid of threats and running this pack are more important to me than hanging out with you enough to somehow know what's bugging you all the time, and I'm sorry that I don't know what's going through your head. I'm not psychic," she practically seethed. She would calm down later, but right now she was feeling vulnerable and almost insulted. His attitude was unwarranted and yet he justified it by claiming she wasn't attentive enough. Maybe she wasn't always, but Saena tried her best, and to have that thrown back in her face was painful.

When Arion claimed to not be the Arion she thought he was, she almost spat, "clearly not," but held her tongue. Instead, she turned and walked away. She heard his announcement that he was leaving to go to his den, confirmation that he had no intention of helping her, and confirmation for the retreating alpha female that he was not ready to be a beta. That he might never be fit to help lead this pack, not with his current attitude. She didn't say anything, just kept walking, and when she was out of sight she sent up a loud howl to warn the whole pack about the swirling clouds overhead. From here, she would seek them out for an hour or two, make sure as many of them were safe as possible, and return to her waterfall home... all while a new hurt anger simmered in her breast.