Wolf RPG

Eventually, Pura emerged.

When he did, it was barely morning. The weak, cold glow of a half-revved sun, struggling to penetrate the clouds, made the world look bleak and subtly post-apocalyptic. The breeze still carried a midnight chill in its clutches, and every shadow was dark. It was Pura's favourite time of day.

He had watched them all assemble - Saena, Junior, and their band of followers. Even on their first try, his sisters were doing well for themselves, and he did not begrudge them their success. It was not his place to lead or inspire - Pura understood that now.

A solitary life had thickened the muscles that bound Pura's enormous frame. Without a pack, there was precious little time to loiter, but there was also plenty of food - especially if your tastes were varied. He settled near the bottom of Saena's ridge, turning his broad, freckled muzzle up to stare up its sloping sides. Someone would be patrolling. Someone would see him.

A couple of days after Junior's departure from the Rise, Saena was hit with a deep, impending feeling of dread. Psychology couldn't even explain this strange, knowing feeling that one got when a loved one was affected in a severe way, and Saena was no psychologist, but from that moment on, worry sat heavy in her belly for her sibling, wherever she was. Her time patrolling the ridge's borders was doubled. She found herself staring out to the east, awaiting any sign of Junior's lanky figure on the horizon so that she could relax, but on day five, it still hadn't come.

The Alpha female stood rigidly on an outcropping, staring hard out at the fields to the east. The sun glinted off the face of the distant glacier, and she could see the tumbled rocks that made up the moraine clearly, but there was no black wolf walking toward her home. Saena sucked her lower lip into her mouth and gnawed on it, a nervous behaviour she'd picked up months ago and hadn't been able to kick. She stood there a while longer, then began to descend the slope on the rest of her patrol. When she spotted a white-grey pelt through the trees and a large figure, she was so surprised and shocked that she bit down on the lip she'd been unconsciously chewing so hard that she drew blood and cursed.

Standing there at her borders was Pura, her brother, whom she hadn't said goodbye to before leaving (because she hadn't found him in time). Her heart beat rapidly in her chest, both due to anxiety over Junior's continued absence and the likelihood that her brother was upset with her for leaving him behind (just like Peregrine had done to them, she realized).

"Pura," she breathed, drawing up in front of him with a vaguely dominant stance. She didn't approach him out of fear and also a little mistrust—there was something different about him that wasn't just muscle mass, but she had no idea what it was. "I'm so sorry, I meant to find you, I just..." here she trailed off. She just, what? Forgot about him? Hadn't taken the time to find him? All of it sounded awful.

She came. Pura's heart fluttered almost imperceptibly in his chest before returning to its slow, perpetually even rhythm. He dwarfed her physically, but this was Saena's territory, and her Goliath brother obediently hunched his shoulders in deference to her rank - behaviour that he had learned, and rarely practised. For his sister, he would try. Pura did not doubt that he would lose her forever if she ever found out what sort of creature he was, and the thought of it made him physically ache. A wolf does not eat another wolf, Peregrine had told him. It followed that a wolf did not retain his sister's head as an erotically charged plaything, either.

He stared down at the little alpha female in what might have passed for an adoring way, nostrils flaring to catch the lovely aura of scent that surrounded her. "It's all right," he rumbled monotonously, forcing himself to blink. "I found you again."

A lot had changed in the time she'd been away from him. That stuff could wait, though. His gaze was adoring, much as it always had been, and she smiled lovingly up at him as well. Like always, she was unaware of any sinister thoughts in his head. Pura was kind of weird, but he wasn't a malicious creature. He was a gentle giant.

"You did," she agreed. She needn't ask how. Her visit to the plateau was recent enough that her scent was probably easy to track here. "But what about the plateau? What about Valtyr?" Shortly after leaving home, Saena had seen the red-pointed Sveijarn in the north, but he had fled away before she had a chance to speak with him. It had stung, but she hadn't followed. Whatever strange possessiveness the Redtail had previously felt for Pura's pupil had fled with him.

It was curious that Pura would leave him there, though. It was that which Saena sought to understand.

Pura offered a shrug. He hadn't thought about Valtyr at all, and wasn't entirely sure if the younger boy still resided at the Plateau. "Valtyr isn't my sister," he answered, recognizing that two questions in a row meant that Seana wanted more from him than silence. "And he's a grown-up," Pura added for good measure, using up his entire reserve of words for the day in one breath.

Pura made good points. Saena couldn't possibly refute them. Yet part of her imagined that Pura and Valtyr were closer, and another part of her wished the younger wolf had come here, too. She couldn't really explain that feeling, though; it had persisted ever since Osprey went into heat. She missed the red-pointed Sveijarn and thought of him fondly, even if he had chosen the plateau over his friends.

"So are you here to join us?" she wondered aloud. She didn't think that Pura would necessarily fit in with the others of her pack, but she would never turn her brother away. He was the only blood family she had, and she had always been very fond of him, if not a little concerned with his occasionally flighty behaviour.