Eske’s grief threatens to crush her and she does not know what to do with it. She thinks about it, dwells upon it and allows it to fester like an infection within her. Kendra’s absence is felt keenly by the Cheka whose heart aches for the loss of both a friend and a loved one. She has never dealt with loss like this: losing someone she cares deeply for to death. She did not consider Gavriel and Gyda’s relocation loss. They weren’t gone in the same sense as Kendra. She did not mourn her parents. She mourned Kendra. The pain smarts and Eske is not sure, fresh as it is of course, that it will ever go away. Her eyes prickle hotly with unshed tears (can wolves shed tears?) as she numbly walks her patrol. Routine except now it isn’t. It feels different. Everything feels different. She will never be the same, she realizes. Kendra has touched her life in ways she had never imagined anyone being able to and though Eske does not see it now, does not feel gratitude for it through the pain of loss she will realize it in the future. In her unstable emotional state the Cheka realizes she would welcome a trespasser. She would welcome the thrill of the fight, the thought that she could turn her grief into her natural defense: aggression. Aggression she knew. Aggression she knew how to process and how to (properly) vent but no one had ever trained her on how to deal with the death of a wolf she loved. How she was meant to process it, how she was meant to heal. No one told her that the hurt was immeasurable, that it was, somehow, worse than a physical wound. She tried to bury it in her duties keeping to them in a manner that is akin to mechanical.

Eske hears the footfalls approaching, the scent of Heda clings to the pelage of the other but she recognizes the more poignant scent as that of the prisoner. He intercepts her path and she stops, with reluctance and heavy hostility in her movements as her sea-glass gaze falls sharply upon the indignant child who throws her a mocking look to go with his insolent words. Her tail rises high over her back, upper lip curling back from her teeth. He has nerve for not submitting to her. She is Cheka and he…he is nothing to her. He is less than nothing. She itches to tear into his mocking expression for speaking to her. She does not answer, grinding her teeth together from sinking down to his pathetic level though the restraint is great. Eske has never been great at controlling her aggression and in her emotional state her grief is only gasoline to her. “Go crawl on your belly back to Heda, Honon.” She spits the word prisoner in her native tongue to him, accenting her words with a low snarl. She is no mood for him and if he did not cease to provoke her ire it would be only Thuringwethil that could save him from her. If he did not leave her be Eske would have no issue about putting him in his rightful place: in the dirt beneath her with her teeth wrapped around his throat.