Ever since her return, Wraen had harboured a quiet hope of meeting either of her brother again. She had known of his demise, when still alive. There were some matters that had never been settled between them. She had accepted that life was never perfect as stories. More often than not there were no happy endings, no "I am sorry"s and "I forgive you"s, no closures. Relationships poisoned by bitter arguments. And sometimes they simply ran out of material and people, who had once been very close, now stood before each other feeling indifferent. Worse than strangers. 

Being a ghost - free of worries for survival and fear of death - gave inexhaustible amounts of time to think things through, reminisce and make some conclusions. Wraen wished and hoped that in this big universe, where billions of souls from all the creatures that had walked this Earth lived, she would run into a familiar or rather a very specific couples of souls. Therefore, when she sensed a pull to yet another person, who had known her during life, she did not hesitate to respond. Full of hope she appeared in Heartwood - another place she had frequented as a young wolf, but which had not left any lasting impression. "Terance?" she called out to her siblings, her voice echoing in the forest. 

She met neither, but someone different. Another child she first seen as an infant and then grow up and reach those milestones that Wraen never had achieved - a mateship and family. Again with sadness she realized that this girl too had been taken from the world far too early. That they should have encountered each other not as two ghosts, but as a ghost and a middle-aged woman, who was still going strong and taking everything life had to offer. "I am glad to meet you," she told the girl, stepping out of the shadows to make her presence known. "I did not expect to see you here so soon though."

Ibis did not seem to recognize Wraen, which made her pause a bit. Could it be that she had mistaken this ghost for someone else? Something told her though that it did not happen to ghosts. She could not explain, why and how, but she just knew this. Call it a bloodline or connection formed early on that had lasted even beyond the veil. 

"Sure, looks like fun!" Wraen agreed, gliding closer to the leaf pile and testing it with her paw. Up until then she had been quite confident that being a ghost meant not being able to touch anything belonging to the material world. At least she had not been able to do it in her earlier encounters, however, here in Ibis's presence... it worked!

"Huh! That's some magic," she said to herself, beamed at her niece and threw some leaves up with her muzzle. They rained down on and around her, she stood in the middle of it, remembering that autumn had always been one of her favourite seasons. Because of the combination of colours, smells, temperature, the angle of light - everything.g 

"What game have you got in mind?" she then asked, mirroring Ibis's carefree and playful body-language. 

Convincing people of realities of life was for the living. The ghosts - Wraen decided - had the freedom to choose, what they did with their ethereal existence. Therefore she readily agreed to Ibis's suggestion and followed her, looking for that perfect puddle to do leaf reading as keenly as her niece did. She became aware of, how easy it was for her to move as quickly or as slowly as she wanted now. The memory of how difficult had the last weeks of her life been was not as vivid. She rather remembered some details, facts, but not the exact feeling itself. Such as shortness of breath, constant headaches, heaviness of limbs and how even the shortest distances felt like thousand miles long. Now... as kind of a compensation for all that suffering, she could exist with ease again. 

It was also nice to feel as giddy as a child again! The passage of time is like an eternity, when you are a kid, because the amount you learn against the proportion of life lived is huge. Then over years you reach a point, where very few things surprise you, and there are even fewer that incite excitement. There are events that appear to repeat themselves over and over again. And - unbeknownst to you - you grow boring and somewhat cynical too. Now, however, having had a long break from the world, Wraen saw it with new eyes and without knowledge of, when her tenure here would end, she wanted to embrace the experience to the fullest. 

"Any luck?" she asked Ibis, who during Wraen's moment of contemplation had walked ahead. 

Wraen followed after her niece in the woods, noting, how much happier and more cheerful she looked now than she ever had seen her as a living wolf. There were foggy memories of Ibis's childhood, fragments of a little, very beautiful girl, who took after her mother in her looks, and whose innocence and belief in the goodness of the world and people in it had not yet been shattered. Then came Seabreeze's decision to leave and her brother's choice to stay. And to this day Wraen could not understand, why had loyalty to Sunspire and Rannoch had been more important to her brother than keeping his young family together? Did he ever regret it? She would never find out now. 

Then she remembered the angry teenager she had come across, when she had been scouting the lands beyond the Sunspire mountains. Again - the exact details of the argument escaped her and probably no longer mattered. What had been very obvious then... Ibis had not been happy. After that another long break and she had met the girl now very much in love and in hopes of creating a family. And even that gods or fate or both had not placed in her cards. Why was it so that some people got everything and then there were Ibis's of the world, who were being teased by hope of a happy life, have it dangled right above their noses and just withdrawn the moment they reached out to grab it. 

"I think that we need special kinds of leaves for that," Wraen explained, closing the distance between them and having the same trouble of moving the leaves. "What I mean - these leaves are dead. The essence of life - the spirit of them is, what matters, and what would work for us best," she told. "Shall we look for them together?" she asked. "What do you want to ask the oracle about the future?"

Ibis chose to ignore Wraen's suggestion and she did not insist. She was a guest at her niece's party and it was only polite to respect, what they wanted to do in their afterlife. Truth to be told, Wraen did not know a lot of, what had happened in Terance's daughters life, before she had joined her in Brecheliant, but had she known the details, it would have helped her to understand her actions now. With that lacking, she was left to wonder, if Ibis was trying to escape from something. 

When she mentioned children, it was Wraen's turn to rake through her memory and find the names and the exact number of them. Lilitu - her lookalike as a kid - was the first to come to mind. Then there had been the sister that had gone missing - Arielle? Then two girls and a boy, born shortly before Wraen had died and - sadly - she had felt so bad during that last month, that she had never properly got to know them. It was a shame really, because they were her brother's grandchildren and without her being there to tellt hem stories about Terance, she felt that they had missed an important part of their life-story. Now - they would never find out. 

"Have you tried finding them?" Wraen asked. "I have found that, if they still occasionally think about you, you feel kind of a pull towards them. If lucky, if they wish so, you can talk to them as well," she suggested. "Won't tell much about their future, but - in my opinion - knowing, where they are now and what they are doing, may impact that future a lot," she said.