Vashti woke up with a start, flinching awake as if she had been touched by something icy and then settling again as a chill passed along her spine and racked her with a violent shiver. The morning was quite warm, but it was the cold and dead body beside her that had driven the youth suddenly into a realm of wakefulness. Her long ears perked and she glanced from side to side, drawing her limbs closer into her body as she slowly realized that this was the first morning she'd ever woken up completely and utterly alone...
Yuri was there, her mother, but as mentioned before she was dead. She had been too weak to go on the previous day, and the pair had settled beneath Sheepeater Cliff for a spell before continuing their journey northeast. Except, Yuri would never again get to her feet. She had died sometime before nightfall, and Vashti had been blankly at her side ever since, knowing her mother would not wake up but waiting for the moment anyway.
When night had cloaked them and Vashti could no longer keep her eyes open, she had curled up next to Yuri's stiffened frame and fallen asleep in the shadow of the cliff. When she was awake, and her mother was not, it truly hit her that she could not simply lie beside this cold-blooded wolf and wait for death to take her too. A punctuating growl from her slender belly accented this thought and reminded her that for several days her mother had been too uncoordinated to hunt while young Vashti herself hadn't had any luck in the venture.
But despite her aching gullet and how it verbally goaded her to get up and try again, she simply remained at Yuri's side, taking on the scent of death and chasing away any crow or creature of carrion that dared ventured too near.
I'm being vague about what happens with Fox and Njal since those will prob. be important threads.
The white female's mouth hung open, filtering the scent of fresh death in. Her nose was angled toward the sky as she plodded across the flatlands, intending to return home, but the scent pulled her elsewhere. It was cooler than it had been the week prior, and the sky told of coming rain, but a little rain never bothered the Kesuk any. While other wolves often sought shelter from storms, lithe Jinx remained in them, the polar opposite of her mother. Lightning lover. It was not her element, yet she found inspiration in its speed and comparative strength for her own fighting style.
But the clouds didn't reveal any lightning. A light drizzle, perhaps, in the late afternoon. She had never been much of a weatherwitch, though, and might find that her guess was far off. But her attention was pulled to the sky briefly and then returned to the task at hand: tracking down the scent of death, where a free meal might await her.
A fresh kill was better, but she wouldn't pass up an effortless meal.
What she found was not, in fact, an effortless meal, but something much more interesting. Tucked under the sheep-infested ridges of the central mountain range were the bodies of wolves. Initially, Jinx assumed they both were dead, since both smelled of death, and approached boldly. Perhaps it wasn't an effortless meal, for it taxed morality, but their bodies were cold and flesh was flesh, she thought to herself. If the Kesuk had once been above consuming the flesh of her own kind, she certainly wasn't now, knowing the next few weeks could be desperate ones as she and her small band scrambled for a foothold on the mountain on which to establish themselves. She needed her strength, she reasoned, stepping toward the pair of bodies with eyes gleaming...
Vashti shut herself against the approach of another wolf. She tried to ignore the unhidden pawsteps and deny what her nose told her. She closed her eyes against the nightmare—against the fact that she would have to face the world alone from then on.
Blue eyes craned open warily and she found herself gazing into the nearing face of a gold-eyed scavenger. She was a large colorless female, though this was of no consequence to Vashti. The only thing that concerned her was that shine in the stranger's eyes. Something of mischief; something the young wolf felt she should fear.
Vashti's reaction to fear was currently: violence.
With a snarl pitched two octaves too high to be honestly threatening, the girl was up and prickling wildly, all four paws splayed in a graceless, though defensive stance. Her teeth, still too large and too bright for her young, slim muzzle, were bared angrily towards the white female as her throat vibrated continuously with wordless threats.
She was so close she could have sunk her teeth into the larger of the bodies, but suddenly the corpses exploded with whirling activity, forcing the Kesuk to stumble back to avoid a mouthful of teeth catching her in the face. Confusion thrummed through her bloodstream, betrayed by the cautious way she spread her paws apart and how her ears were pricked as far forward as they could go, but it was a growl of warning laced with danger that she uttered. A badger, she suspected, hiding in wait, chewing the corpses from the inside out...
But, no, it wasn't a badger. When frightful alarum wore off, the Swiftcurrent Beta was able to realize what was happening. One of the corpses, it turned out, hadn't been totally dead after all. The smaller of the two, black-furred, blue eyed, and prickling like a porcupine. An adolescent. The persistent snarl that fell into the space between them was fierce and warranted caution, but not only that. It was full of fear, the most dangerous sort of aggression.
Seeing as her appetite had been foiled by the living status of one of the corpses, and knowing violence would ensue, Jinx settled back into a more neutral posture, indicating she wasn't going to do anything from this point onward. "What have we here," she crooned, tensing in case the wild juvenile flew off the handle at the words and came flying toward her. "Risen from the dead? The spirits must not like you very much, child, to put you back where they found you." She was, after all, erroneously believing that Vashti had been dead and suddenly came back to life. The smell emanating from her coat was definitely that of death.