Trepidation grasped a hold of Sköll and held him in merciless and iron clasping hold, digging, like the claws of a nightmarish creature into his entire being until he stood, visibly hesitating on the banks of the River. It was not the river that inspired such dark fear in the tiny Viking. Instead, it was the scent of Ragnar, once Jarl of Odinn’s Cove and best friend of his father, familiar despite the foreignness that clung to it and lingered. Beyond the scent of the many of the pack, Ragnar’s scent trail held a distinctive woman’s scent, and on that the scent of mother’s milk, newborns. Kenna’s eldest living son was here exactly where it had been told he could be found which was also a weight lifting relief. Or it would have been if Sköll wasn’t faced with the realization that he would need to tell Ragnar that he had lost the twins on the journey to this …Elsewhere. Hati and Fenrir were not Ragnar’s full siblings but they were still siblings, nevertheless, and Kenna had trusted Sköll with a wholeness that for the brief days that the twins had actually listened to him had filled the tiny Viking with pride. Only to be inherently crushed by them giving him the slip.

At least, that was what Sköll had believed had happened that they had intentionally left him while he was sleeping hoping to disengage from their ‘babysitter’. It served to grow more and more pathetic the longer Sköll thought about it; he had needed the twins who were fluent in the common tongue to serve as his translators. Without them…he was likely to find his young life cut very abruptly short. Sköll glimpsed down at his shimmering reflection in the shallows of the river, blazing orange eyes staring back at him. In his mother, Helga, the blazing orange had been a passionate color, bright and lively. In Sköll they had the great potential to be fierce and fiery — instead they were submissive and puppy-ish. Some Viking he was. His pathetic-ness (if at all possible) was only intensified by the acknowledgment that he could not face Ragnar, could not look him in the face and admit that he had lost his mother’s youngest children. That among that they could be captured, or lost, or worse yet dead because he failed. He failed at being a Guard, failed at being an Escort, couldn’t even watch a couple of kids and inherently failed at being a Viking.

Ears slicked back to lay against his skull, shoulders sagging as he sighed in defeat, lowering his head to lap at the cool water trickling over the stones of the shallows thinking that he would rest here for a bit before moving on.