For the past few days Frolic had been wandering around, wheezing and coughing, as if trying to get her lungs out of her chest. And today Dwin had woken up feeling almost the same. It was certainly not her first cold, but, when you are used to being healthy all the time and scoffing at the disease as something that happens to other people, your over-confidence takes a bit of a blow. She hated the scratchy feeling - a cold in the making, when you sort of have to cough, but not yet and all you come up with are brief and annoying sets of "khe, khe, khe". According to her dad it took one wolf to get the whole pack sick and it seemed that they were in the process of creating the Coughing chorus of the Brecheliant. 

Therefore Dwin kept her distance from the rest and busied herself with patrolling the borders, checking, who came in and out, and renewing border markings, where it was needed. With so few of them around now and not being well versed in the art of marking sparingly, she could not cover the whole length. Therefore, when her bladder informed about being out of fuel, she rubbed her scent in the tree-barks and left claw markings as well. After all scent could convey a lot of information except the size and the character of the wolf. 

"Yup - I got the plague and you got the plague?" Dwin asked instead of a greeting, when she caught sight of Amalia in the distance. She wanted to come nearer and do a proper ritual - as usual - when she realized, why her packmate was, where she was and not any closer. "I think that stuff is getting around quickly Frolic has it, Sylvie has it, mom has it, but she won't admit that she does," she listed all the people she knew, who might have got the sickness. "Probably no stopping it now, but I hope that you are well at least," she half-stated/half-asked. 

"How are you doing - physically and soulwise?" she asked, sitting down and having genuine interest in her friend's state. 

"Wanting to leave here seems to be a trend lately," Dwin remarked more to herself than to Amalia. But with her having had similar sentiments time from time, she did not hold it against the she-wolf. After all, what did she have to hold her here? She had joined the ranks of her own free will and was also just as free to go. One less person to believe in the magical forest that this place was supposed to be. 

"Was it the same that mauled Bronco?" Dwin asked, feeling a bit uneasy. But also glad that her packmate had gone through the experience with less grave injuries. "Was it anywhere around here?"

Amalia did not want to dwell on the details about getting mauled by a beast and Dwin perfectly understood that. She also hated to return to that rainy, muddy day, when she had found her little Miss Dee lying unconscious and not knowing in the beginning, whether her sister had been still alive or not. Yet it was a bit of a relief to hear that this had not happened anywhere near caldera. Although she had grumpy thoughts about the younger brood of Blackthorns, she would not want to wish any one of them harm.

"Same old, same old. Watching kids, filling caches and checking the borders, whenever it is possible," she told with a shrug. A super-boring existence. A far cry from the exciting life she had imagined herself to live. By this age she should already have become a ninja-spy-master (or something along those lines) or at least rid some haunted forests of demonic possessions. As it turned out in real life you did not even need supernatural danger. The regular one was quite enough to trigger adrenaline rushes and leave her exhausted and sleep-deprived. 

"Have you... ever wanted to become a leader?" Dwin suddenly asked, looking Amalia up and down. Something Teya had hinted to her in their last conversation made her wonder. What if... or rather why not Amalia?

Dwin had not expected Amalia to jump at the opportunity and tell her that this had been her lifelong dream, but even an ounce of more excitement would have been encouraging. "Yeah - me neither," she shrugged. "It is just that with Bronco gone Teya has remained as the only leader and... in a recent conversation of ours she kind of let me know that she did not want to do this anymore. It is my assumption, not that she said this in so many words," she explained. 

"And... I thought... with my parents being old and Teya going through a rough spot, and me - I am not yet ready for something like this - I thought... maybe you would want to help her? As a Raven or Auspex," she looked at Amalia hopefully. "On the other hand... we are already managing without an Auspex and it kind of makes me wonder... whether we need to fill this spot for the sake of filling it or rather just keep things as they are. Horizontal," she mused.

"I understand that Auspex is an elected position. Ravens too. But I doubt that, when they founded the pack, they ever imagined a situation, where there would be very little to choose from," Dwin mused. "But if we were to vote, I think I would vote for you," in part, because it would mean she did not have to take any responsibilities. And in part, because she had a feeling that Amalia would really do a good job here. She was also slightly biased - trusting her own sex more than the opposite one. Which meant that if it was a choice between a man and Amalia, her vote would go to her, even if he proved to be more qualified and personality made of gold. 

"I don't think mom would want to be a leader again," she shared her observations, but could not be 100% sure. People could change their minds. "Or... not on her own at least," in a way Dwin was similar to her mom. Both had shrunk away from big responsibilities, while being young and adventurous wolves. Only life later played the cards so that they had to pick up trades they never imagined to. "But... you can bring it up, maybe? If you feel like it. I mean, I am afraid that they won't ask themselves," meaning that out of fear of placing a burden on someone else's shoulders, they would not. 

Dwin sighed in relief, glad that this was covered and that she would (hopefully) not have to deal with filling leadership vacancies in the nearest future. There was even a faint glimmer of hope that she would be able to go on another solo-journey next spring. Faint, because up until now life had got in the way every time she had made such plans and she had been forced to postpone them. 

For a moment she felt a bit guilty for throwing this at her older packmate, because despite Dwin's firm belief that adults had only boring and routine things in mind Amalia may have had her own designs of, what she had wanted to do. "Anyway," she began and was interrupted by a big yawn. "Sorry! Umm... how is your brother doing? Is he still running with the Moonspear wolves?" she asked, because the silence between them threatened to grow too long and awkward. 

By asking about Amalia's brother Dwin's thoughts inadvertently shifted to her own two siblings - Aiden and Jay. The former had been one of the first to go out in the wild world and she no longer missed him particularly. They had not been very close as kids and with time and distance their bond had weakened as well. Then there was Jay, who was the most similar to her, who understood her from half a word and whose smile and jokes and enthusiasm for life could make Dwin's day brighter. She thought about him nearly every day and hoped very much that she would have a chance to meet him again someday. And somehow, when that would happen, she was convinced that time and distance would not have changed one thing between them. 

"And yet he has stayed with one pack for a very long time," she pointed out. Well, few months may not have felt awfully much to Alaric, but for a young person, who was not yet two and who still learned a new thing or skill daily, that felt like an eternity. "Frolic has made sure that I have had small trips all around here for most of the summer," she told, exaggerating the truth. "But I have spoken to my parents and we intend to explore the new lands east from here. There was a mountain range before and then something happened, it broke apart and - voila! - there is a whole new world there," she told.

"It is definitely worth making a trip there. The land over there compares to nothing that we see here," Dwin told. "There is very little green - a lot of red and yellow sand, long stretches of dunes. Kind of like at the coast, except you never see a big water thingie starting somewhere. There are odd prickly pants, kind of like..." she paused trying to come up with the best way to describe a cactus to a person, who had never ever seen it before. "...as if someone had planted hedgehogs head down in the sand. There are big prickly plants and then there are those that have small, nasty, fur-like needles that sting you and you cannot get rid of them," she referred to an encounter with a bunny ear cactus. Worth noting that Dwin's narrator had one as a kid and that little nasty thing fell off the windowsill and had to be picked up numerous times and those spines were horror to deal with.

"That place appeared to me like the playground of the god. When he had finished making this - regular world - he decided to take a day off and throw all the weird things there. It really gives you that feel," she told and fell silent to catch a breath, because being a waterfall of words is just as taxing as sprinting without prior preparation for it. "But you have travelled before - right? Any weird places you have seen during your travels?" she asked. 

Deliver message from what? The name of the person involved did not sound familiar to her at all. For a moment, she even found it strange that Amalia had life and connections outside Brecheliant, because for 80% of time Dwin's perception of the packmate was that of a lovely piece of old furniture. It is always there and never leaves. Well, since Dwin had no idea, what house fittings are, she had a thought of something equivalent. 

"Well, if it was millions of eyes, it could have been a hydra of sort," she pointed out, referring to the story of the monster, who for every head bitten off could grow three instead. "Though they are not known for being too keen on looking at people, they enjoy eating them a lot better," she smiled. "Moonglow? Where is it exactly? I know Dee lives there and she may have given me directions, but I am not good at remembering them," she asked.

. 

"Oh, I did not know that. I thought you and your brother were sworn nomads," Dwin exclaimed and immediately began to wonder, what had prompted Amalia to leave Moonglow. Was it just a mismatch of personalities? Or beneath the surface of kindness and love for traditions lied something more sinister? Dwin's creative mind did not need much details to weave fantastic and impossible scenarios. All rooted in the fact that she missed Dee very much and really wanted to have her here in Brecheliant and not somewhere far off. 

"So - did they try to marry you off to some three-legged, one-eyed, ears-missing, foul-smellying, mangy old and boring man?" she asked playfully, conjuring a mental image of somewhat awful wolf-being. A horror of any young girl's dreams.

"Yeah, what has he to fear - I have not heard that Moon-packs attempt to marry off their men. Though... nah, I understand the logic. It would be below any woman's honor to have to impress a man and bring him groom-prices or, whatever those matrimonial challenges are," Dwin mused - as it happened often with her she started the sentence with one idea and ended up with an entirely different one. If one was observant enough, they would catch the slightly arrogant tone, when she spoke of the opposite sex. Dwin had not had high opinion of men earlier and this year had only strengthened this view. Brecheliant had already been predominantly run by women. Now that Bronco had died (sorry, man, but despite the circumstances Dwin held this fact against him simply because all of the women had survived) and with her own father growing frailer and weaker by the week, she did not consider them reliable at all. 

"Then - why here? What's different here compared to there?" Dwin asked the next logical question. 

"In charge until they are not," Dwin did not want to lose this argument, even though her view of Moon-packs and their traditions was constructed from the tidbits she had heard and her imagination had glued the rest of the image together. It was not the most accurate one, but it was enough to form a strong sense of resistance against them. 

"Mom is awesome," Dwin agreed. Maia was unique to Brecheliant, one of the founding wolves and one, who in Dwin's eyes, embodied what their pack was. It was sad, however, to think that with her gone one day, so would the Enchanted forest.