Blacktail Deer Plateau From Under the Floorboards

Set several miles north of Rusalka’s temporary claim— somewhere between BDP and Ravensblood Forest.

From the sagged, howling coast he ran. Devastated by what he had found, or the lack thereof, and determined to prove it false. He was a sunspear streaking— a wolf winged by flights of devils— and cutting through the everlasting gray of the apocalypse, he went on a dogged search for any sign that his pack remained...

This went on for days that turned to weeks, given all the seismic activity to crown Svalinn's general ineptitude; and at present, he was worse for wear, as if he’d recently been in a rather nasty fight.

There was only a spike in his anxiety— a sudden quickening of his broken heart— to properly herald his due arrival, and for the first time in months he felt the dread of a ragged guillotine hanging over him become mixed with prescient relief. She's alive. For the hundredth time against a bitter sky scorned, he paused to throw back his golden head and call out to @Raleska! before redoubling his pace heading south.

acting like at this point in time, tunerk is back in RUS! since l2d2 said I could I WILLLLL

Tunerk had returned and was as productive as she could be. Life was far from a dream without food and the frigid day matched her equally frigid mood. The northern woman could not feel it though; such temperatures were what she was used to and even preferred. The sound of anothers hollering had Tunerk, who was fortuitously close, coming to meet them. Raleska was a name she knew after all.

And his was a familiar face, too, if only vaguely so. She stopped nearly a yard away from him, and squinted; she could not recognize him entirely. So she simply stood there and watched, trying to remember.

The necessity of food had Raleska ranging further and further these days. Against a bitterly cold wind she set for the plateau’s edge when a cry came above the wind and bade her limbs to still. 

The voice. Raleska’s straining ears listened, knowing that voice — her brow knit and lip harried into a frown. Had she imagined it? Was it just a prank of the wind, or a trick of her gradually starving mind?

Had she lost her senses?

By then she saw Tunerk, a pale wraith against the grey — wordlessly she followed, stunned into a shell shocked silence as the gold-hooded Svalinn came into view. Lean, gaunt, and horrifying— but Svalinn all the same. 

Her throat worked for words, laboriously — finally, a name pressed forth. Svalinn? Her tone was hopeful, yet made so fragile by all the hardships she’d endured — where had he (and her mother) ever gone?

Several months running stag hadn't done Svalinn any favors, but these particularly hellish last few weeks had left him both physically diminished and socially traumatized. It made him react unkindly to the sudden presence of another; his face contorting into a compulsory snarl as he turned in the silent she-wolf's direction. Her stark white coat and deep, deep, deep eyes did not stir any immediate recollection within the wild vagrant, but his clambering aggression was staved by the scent of Rusalka—

... Home.

The tarnished wolf withdrew his teeth and suppressed an incipient thunder, yet neglected to lessen the grip of his fiery gaze on her. He was moodily standoffish for a beat, perhaps trapped between knowing he should apologize and the knowledge that he would never. Then after such a pause he frowned suddenly, as if trying to puzzle out something about her face, which all became diverted at the soft, nearly unfamiliar sound of his name.

His entire body shivered, and he turned with breakneck haste to meet Raleska— Raleska!— full-on and with the unbridled joy of a dog who hasn't seen its favorite person for a very long time. Svalinn threw himself at the pithy darkling, and hoped desperately not to let go.

Tunerk matched him tit-for-tat, though her response was more for defense; she took no offense, simply wanted him to leave her be. She was too hungry now to want to think about fighting, and her attitude toward it was must I? and the belief that no, I do not. Fortunately, Raleska then came—and their reunion seemed... well, personal. Like brother, and sister. Raleska was something akin to a sister to her, for Caiaphas having taken her in... but they were not so close as these two.

Not bothered by this, Tunerk's tail twitched as she turned to let them be. [i]Svalinn,[i] she thought to herself. It was familiar somehow—but she was slow in realizing how. As she walked off to find more food Tunerk continued to think about it.

Raleska barely had time to read the room. Her legs were carrying her to Svalinn of their own accord, their ambition only outpaced by the gilded wolf’s own. Tunerk was somewhere behind her, but all Raleska could think about was Svalinn; he was here, alive, thank god alive —

They met in a flurry of tail wags and whimpers, Raleska’s affection and anxiety and joy unbridled as she preened through his fur, brushed against him, never wanting to step back and see how much he’d changed, how dark and somber his eyes seemed, how scarred his legs.. but their moment of fond reunion must come to an end, and Raleska pushed from Svalinn and measured his harried appearance with a note of sorrow. What happened to you?

Though Svalinn could act for a moment that things would be better from now on, there was a cold, vacuous part of him that couldn't enjoy Raleska's affection; the same part of him that dreaded her asking the inevitable. All of him started to quiver as she spoke it, and the tattered fiend turned his sullen muzzle away from her in shame. I... He wanted to lie— surely he could get away with it— but as he noticed the backside of a retreating Tunerk, he felt the resolve to hide from his sister gently fade away. I let Ma die, he admitted in a hush, and then louder: I left our Mother to die. The truth of it.

He melted to the frigid ground, weakened by both his admission and overextending himself upon greeting her. He lay ragdoll before her, supplicant and welcome to her ire. When his throat wasn't immediately torn out, he began to recount dully: I went to find her— you know I couldn't just let her go off with that cliff wolf— and she was hurt real bad by the time I found her. I tried, I did, I really tried to take care of her, but she just got sick, and her wounds... they smelled like... Death he didn't want to say, but in not knowing another word for it either, he instead opted to engage in an estranged silence. Svalinn swallowed the dry lump in his throat, and tasted bile.

I was scared, Les... Her breathing would get so low, and I wasn't hunting well enough to keep us both fed, even before everything else started going to shit, and— What more could I have done? I was a coward. I left her because I couldn't watch her die, and I've been paying for it since. He needn't mention all the scraps and carcass-wars he'd endured since their separation. His skin-torn body told that part of the story on its own. I was too ashamed of what I'd done to come back and tell you... but then the ground started shaking. And you were all I could think about.

He looked up at her— a haunted and broken shell at her feet— and his chestnut eyes implored her to end his misery. His life, as he saw no use for it himself, was now hers to do with as she pleased. Svalinn had come back for her, just her, and he would die if that was what she thought he deserved too.

Somewhere in the back of Raleska's mind, she hoped whatever Svalinn spoke of next would be pain and betrayal free.

Yet as she listened, she knew it would not be so.

First a sense of horror flooded her, and then needling its way through that shock was a sense of outrage. How could he? How could he have convinced her to go on that errand, only to fail his task and then come back?

The hope that had only just sprung alive in her chest died there -- withering behind the glassy yellow of her eyes.

Only seconds before she had been overjoyed to see him, drawing from his presence the implication maybe somewhere their mother was alive -- and now, mere ticks of time later, she was shattered like a bough struck by irrevocable thunder.

Her gaze hardened. The line in her jaw grew taut.

"You.... left her..?" Maybe it was all she had heard or could think about. Her tone was deathly cold -- quiet -- yet filled with a burning rage. There was a pause in that quiet question too, a begging note that pleaded he tell her all he had said was just a lie, a mistake, he was wrong and that none of it had happened --

Oh, but the truth had a way of cutting cold and to the marrow, and stealing from all that lived it any sense of joy.

That happiness was ash in her mouth as she learned Caiaphas was dead. "Mom is... dead?" Again came that pleading tone, scarce but a whimper -- for the truth seemed too ugly and cruel to bear.

I— yes... I did, Svalinn whimpered, his voice asudden torn with renewed sorrow.

He shuddered at her feet, closing his eyes to the face she gave him; to the expression that condemned him. Raleska was shocked— horrified, more accurately— and her brother had not been prepared for the devastation he felt at seeing her vision of him turn plainly sour. He had imagined this moment many times, but it wasn't until now that he understood why the dread of it had kept him at bay all this time.

Why it had taken world-ending catastrophes to drive him home...  

He had not dreaded it enough. Whatever nightmares he could conjure on his own simply did not compare to the reality. She was hurting; wounded in a manner far graver than flesh-wounds, and he had done that.

Svalinn braved to look at her again as she sought confirmation. Tried to understand what he had said. I'm sorry, was all he could muster. All he could provide.

A pitiful signature on what would surely be his death note.

Raleska's breath came in shaky gasps, her ears pounding with a rush of blood -- her blood, pounding. He had left her? He had left her? Raleska was torn between fury and despair, sorrow and relief. If what he had said was true, and Raleska had no reason to believe was not, it was likely their mother was dead..

Guilt tormented Raleska, for her first instinct once she had processed all of this was a sorrowful sort of relief. It meant they could finally stop looking, finally stop chasing, finally live. Her mother, recently departed it seemed, had done so much for them -- but she had also caused irreparable strife.

Raleska felt her legs give way. Suddenly she was sitting, breathing rapidly to the point she was nearly hiccuping. Her vision seemed to gather shadows, and then unfurl -- so that Svalinn was swimming before her, no more real than an apparition hazily hanging across the sea. "L-left her." She parroted dumbly, her blood and cheeks tingling. "I.."

She could hold onto her good senses no longer. With a cry, Raleska shoved @Svalinn away from her in a burst of hurt -- and then turned and ran from his form. Tears trailed behind her and blurred her vision, but Raleska did not stop. 

slapping on an ending, hope it is okay <3