Lone Star Mountain Who called me by my name and ran

One more step, the white wolf told herself to spite the burning in her limbs and lungs. It had been a long time since she'd had such a hard climb. Saena was no longer used to the rigors of scaling a mountain, something that had once come so naturally from her early life at the plateau. She didn't remember her journey over the Barrier Mountains coming here, but now she was absorbed in the task of climbing, and the burden was very real. Time in the woods had changed her, moved the muscle of her body from her back legs and shoulders to her front legs and chest, and now she felt the ache of every muscle acutely. In the morning she would scarcely be able to move, but she pressed on.

One more step, thought the pied wolf as she came atop a narrow shelf of rock and sought her next foothold. What motivated her? Even she couldn't say. There was a wildness in her heart that drew her inexorably upward, demanding that she exhaust her energy reserves as if to burn off all the stress she couldn't work through in her head. Her fur snapped around her face and ears as a gust of wind blew down the face of the mountain. She squinted against it, mouth agape as though to taste it, and she pressed on.

One more step, crowed the victorious woman as she at last crested the summit, and stood at the top of the world. It was far from the tallest of its ilk, rivaled by its neighbours and bested by at least one mount in the hinterlands, but it was sufficiently tall for her to feel like she could touch the sky. She angled her snout upward and drank deep the thin, heady air, and then rocked back on her haunches to take in the wilds in all their wondrous glory.

@Warbone maybe? This fits nowhere in Saena's current plot arc and is therefore vague on all that. I just needed another thread and you had asked for one!

omg ew this post is terribad -- but i just needed to throw something up for you before i go!

Though he had not been born to palisades, and had never discovered salvation among their heights before, Warbone suddenly found himself with a sense of peace— high and betwixt the stone crags— that he simply could not find at sea level. The air, thin and whipping, distracted him, forced him to take deeper breaths and reflect further on the farce that had become his life. It was harder to convince himself now that he was someone else; that he was Warbone, and not some aging, one-eyed loon.

A scent touched him, lifting him from a rest that refused to turn to sleep, and beckoning him to follow. The titan, all copper and steel and solemn menace, followed the scent further up, picking his way along carefully until he could see through his half-lidded eye that a small she-wolf loomed ahead. She was looking out over a level outcropping, and before he drew any closer, he chuffed for her attention.

Nonsense, it was lovely!

The hot air that vented from her nose in a slow breath drifted before her eyes like smoke. Up this high, the ground was frosted and the wind chill and biting. The snows would hit here first, she knew. The wilds proper would be free of it for another few weeks, but the mountains would soon be white-capped and glimmering, resplendent in their royal regalia, white-on-grey. There was something truly breathtaking about a proper white-capped mountain. She flexed her toes against the granite underfoot as if she could already feel the snow cupping the warm pads of her feet.

Warbone's chuff would ordinarily have surprised her, jumpy as she was, but her ears shifted back almost lazily as she made a half-turn toward him. Perhaps it was the atmosphere, or the wild beating live and well in her breast, but there was no alarm and no fear. "Did you feel it, too?" she wondered, tilting her snout down slightly to regard him, though he towered over her. Looking down her snout on others was something Saena was accustomed to doing even at her short stature. It came with the territory of leading and it came with being a wolf unable to use a tail to communicate its dominance, and she'd done it for far too long to easily drop old habits. Yet her eyes were neither narrowed nor widened and her ears hung neutrally, hopefully enough to convey no threat.

"The wild sings from so high," she shared, and turned her gaze back to the autumnal vale nestled down below, hugged on all sides by imperious mountains.

All time evaporated in the single moment that it took for the pied monarch to turn an eye on him. Warbone saw everything in that instant, his single eye absorbing a massive eddy of information about her in what would have seemed like a passing glance to an onlooker, but what felt like an eternity to the cyclops. The air stilled, his mental fog parting like the Red Sea; and poised neatly within the bisection of his clarity, was her.

Did you feel it, too?

No, my dear, I felt nothing but you.

His answer came gently, in the form of an acceding grunt.

He could feel the air again— a soft pressure against his side, urging him forward, insisting that he join her. There was little hesitation on his part, for once he had seen no fear or threat creasing the lines of her courtly countenance, he stepped forward with the conviction that he belonged there: beside the uncrowned queen. "The wild sings in all places," he amended gently, the deep reverberation of his voice filling the space between them, even as he sought to close it. "You hear it loudest when you are ready to listen." He felt this way as a man who had spent a lot of his life alone, ignoring all the songs until he was ready to hunt— ready to listen.

Warbone came to see what she overlooked, reflexively positioning himself so that she stood on his right side, and then reclined langorously at her side; near enough to touch, respecting the space not to. The rugged stranger who comes to sit next to you in the lobby. "What are you tuning out, that you hear the wild so clearly right now?" he asked without looking at her, his head inexplicably turned towards the Thunder Dome, though more specifically towards where the Keep lie.

Warbone's tone was deep and comforting. Despite a natural skittishness around strangers, Saena had no qualms with his approach, and when he took a place to the left, she turned her head to regard him, but had no qualms with his near-intimate nearness, either. Perhaps it was being on the precipice of her life, unsure of where to go and what to do and whether living was truly better than dying. Perhaps it was because she'd been alone for so long and yearned for company that didn't know of her past mistakes. More likely than not, it was the thrum of wild blood in her veins, the awakening of an inner animal that hid beneath her conscious self, but begged to be let out now that she felt like she was at the bottom.

But she was at the top, she recalled, and the wild blood sang louder than any amount of depression, right along with the howl of the wind in her ears. There were still things to do. There was still something to live for. Warbone claimed that the wild's song was loudest when you were ready for it, and maybe that was a sign that she was ready for something, too. His question caught her unawares and her brows drew down, hooding her bright eyes a moment and casting a sorrowful pall over her expression.

"Everything," she answered at length. "My home was taken from me. My pack was taken from me. My children were taken from me. I'm afraid I have nothing left that I once lived for, so maybe it's the wild looking to reclaim my bitter, broken soul." Or take me to my grave, she thought darkly. Or take me somewhere better than this, she silently hoped. Her home in Silver Creek remained open to her, but the longer Saena was away, the less she relished the idea of returning to it. It would never be hers again, much as she wished otherwise, and it wasn't Phoenix Maplewood. It was no longer of her making. She could share leadership, but she'd never been good at sharing, and the pack's loyalty would be divided between two unlike leaders. Nor could she feel justified in attempting to oust its current leader from her position.

She was a wayward spirit, lost and alone, come to seek her daughters, and unsure of what to do should she fail or even should she succeed. She was utterly heedless of Warbone for a moment, her gaze unfocused on the horizon, and then she tilted her snout to gaze questioningly at him. What's your story? she seemed to silently wonder, unaware of how similarly he felt.

i love your writing omg

Everything. Warbone's chest swelled audibly, filling with bitter air and absinthal feelings at the genesis of her tale. His thoughts gave a dizzying swirl, leaving him dazed inwardly even as his body remained aware that he stood on what felt like the edge of the world— what might be the precipice of his very end. As she continued, his experience through her words could only be likened to being struck over and over again by swipes of searing hot metal.

My home was taken from me. The first bullet only grazed him, but it served to effectively take him from the initial ponderous concept of everything. His inner shock was noticeable, apparent in the way his only eye swiveled back to her face, zeroing in on the somber expression set there.

My pack was taken from me. The second winded him, stealing away all the air he had taken in at first, and leaving him suddenly without reprieve from the agony blossoming intensely at his breast. His gaze darted away, fleeing in dark asperity towards Marauder's Keep. His home— His pack— no more.

My children were taken from me. The third and final bullet started a fast and dangerous bleed, poisoning his thoughts of a future he had lost. No, not lost. Taken.

His own sister, in her acid mordancy and private vendetta, had taken from him everything he had built. Everything he had wanted. He could blame no one but her, and to some extent himself, but that did not save anyone else from the residual malice he felt about the situation. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to bound in flying leaps down the face of Lone Star Mountain, using the momentum to careen all the way to the Keep, and kill whatever kept him from his wants...

But they did not deserve to suffer because he was. There wasn't a single face in that pack he knew well, or at all, and everything he had once placed there in aim to build upon it, had been swept away in the months he had lost himself. Warbone emerged mentally from another bout of the five stages of grief, and accepted his meaningless position again, for about the third time this month.

But maybe he couldn't truly ever accept something like that. Having known and experienced his true calling, the bronze colossus could never comfortably live the life of a loner, and especially not a subordinate. He was a wolf born to reign; to own and defend all those under his stead. He was not meant to serve himself, and he certainly was not a wolf crafted to be a pawn, knight, or bishop. Warbone was made to be king— made to be first.

He could tell she was looking at him, and when he turned his head marginally, he indeed found her eyes; a pair of expressive blues, quietly imploring. He gazed back, openly searching her face for words that had not yet come to him. He was content to just look at her, lost and without any attempt to find his way. "I had fancied myself a shepherd once, and had gathered to me a flock that I loved fiercely. But today I stand, stripped of all that, of everything I had once held dear," he said, putting stress on the word that had taken him with her into this rabbit hole. "And with that has gone my identity. I know my name and I know where I've been, but...  what am I meant to do now? Where do you go when it feels as if there is nothing left?" He couldn't be truly asking, for surely she didn't know.

"Do you crawl up to the high crags to die, with the wild in your ears, calling.. begging us not to?" Even as he spoke it he realized that this might've been exactly why he'd been holed up here. For feeling impotent in the fact that he had no right or claim to challenge the wolves that had taken up residency of the Willows in his absence, had driven away his will to survive, though the instinct for it remained. His greatest pride had also been his greatest fall, and he sat there beside the pied she-wolf, wondering if he should even bother picking up the pieces.

"I am not ready to die," he relented after a quiet moment, with his eyes cast down over the cliff's edge, having decided that suicide (whether it be a quick jump or slow starvation) did not suit his image in the least.

The hot effect that her words had on the suffering Warbone went unnoticed until his gaze met hers. Only then could Saena tell that there was something churning in his skull, and perhaps deeper, in his heart of hearts. There was something as black as her own sorrow hidden in there. She had to wonder if that was why he'd come up this high. She'd climbed to escape her dark feelings, ones that came on so suddenly when she was alone, fears that she kept hidden down most of the time. Surely Warbone had his own demons to chase him to these heights? She only knew she was running to escape her pain when he spoke of it himself, and the realization that she'd subconsciously meant to walk off the edge scared her.

As he spoke, she felt his pain poignantly. She felt the same as him. Her own flock no longer belonged to her, but to a woman she had thought to take for an advisor. It not longer even belonged to her family, its rightful owners. Her beautiful maple forest was no longer occupied, nor could it be, for the threat that hung over it was far too big a weight to place upon anyone. She still believed that threat was issued by Larksong Grotto itself, for her memories of the dragon coiled further in the north were all but gone. Nevertheless, she could never return to the place she'd truly come into her own, nor could she reclaim the broken pieces of it that she'd salvaged, and that sliced to the bone.

"I don't know," she admitted when Warbone voiced his question, not sensing that it was rhetorical. "Maybe." Saena couldn't put words to the feeling that had drawn her to the peak. It was desperation and depression, yes, but also hope, a chance to clear her mind and steady herself for things to come. "It was my ex-mate," she revealed, not sure whether Warbone would care, but it was information she relayed to almost anyone. Even at her lowest, Saena relished a chance to drag Reek through the mud. "We had a beautiful home, a healthy pack, but when our family was just beginning, he chose another. I could not take the slight to my own authority, so I sent them away, only for them to raise up a pack against me mere miles from mine, and threaten to take everything. Even when we left and found a new home, he chased us down, and stole my daughters from under the noses of those protecting them."

She sucked in another chilly breath, filling her lungs with biting air and relishing the prickling pain in her snout momentarily. "And I could not even remember them," she breathed, and her eyes felt itchy with the tears that gathered. "I don't know when it happened, but I forgot them all. I forgot myself, too, and only remembered much later. I wasn't there for them when they needed me, and my place was taken by another. But they weren't there for my kids, either. They let it happen when I was not there to prevent it myself, and I don't know if I can ever forgive them for it, let alone myself, for he is bound to harm them." Maybe by now, Warbone would no longer care for her issues, so she dropped it off with a shaky breath. They were alike, she and him, and while she was much less a wolf of the wild than Warbone, she was beginning to feel like it. In the absence of things to keep her emotionally sated, the animal itself rose up.

"Nor I," she replied eventually. The thought of lurching over that cliff edge sent her heart into her throat, and that was how she knew she wasn't ready. She'd thought for a split second that was the answer, but she knew better now. Warbone made her see. "There is too much left to do in this life." She would rebuild, maybe, or she would wander until her dying day. The wind offered no answers on which of those courses was the better one. Whatever the case, Saena could not forgive herself, and so she did not deserve the potential release that death would bring from lacking anything at all to hold dear.

PSH I think you mean yours is beautiful, I always feels like I'm all over the place, lol. You're so good at keeping your char in the moment and I struggle so much with not writing all about their thoughts and forgetting everything else, haha.

u just don't even kno

As she wove him the tale of her life, he couldn't help but claim the similarities in it, applying each stanza of her woeful song to his own symphony, scarcely needing to change the notes and elements involved. His brows— even the one mangled beyond the appropriation of a brow— creased into a resolved frown, as he decided to tell her of himself.

"My downfall was my sister. She begrudged me for abandoning our culture and drawing many of our kin away from the faith. She sought vengeance for their diminished power, and lured me away from my pack under false pretenses. In the end of things, she wound up with one more eye than she had come with, and a broken neck to take back to her god." He could taste venom just talking about her, and his lip had curled unintentionally during the monologue, but it relaxed as he continued.

"I was left without memory myself, taking up with nomads in the time I spent mending. Months went by before I even started to remember... But I returned to these lands only to find another in my place and no one remaining there that would have spoken on my behalf." It was enough to make the former king feel as if he had not accomplished anything, as if his breast and the heart within it, was not worthy of maintaining its critical pulse.

"My wolves betrayed me," he said softly, finally relinquishing his true, and ultimately unambiguous grudge. It was against those who should have been there to advocate his rightful claim; to protect it, until he had returned. "My sister took everything from me, but what I expected to return to simply did not exist anymore, and broken seemed a word fitting to how I felt..." Warbone breathed, touched and also livened by her presence, feeling an exoneration to having been able to tell his story to ears unbiased by the pieces involved.

His gaze had been set on the sky, watching as moisture began to accumulate on the thin air, and the clouds gently swirled as if to paint a scene of anguish that was collective of the two wolves there on the Lone mountain shelf. But he turned to her then, looking to her now for the strength her presence had inexplicably brought him. "I say they betrayed me, but in all honesty that is just my bitterness crying out in hurt. I see truly that it was not ever their responsibility to uphold my image, but mine alone. I cannot blame my misfortune on those who had to survive without me, but I thought it meant it was my time to purge the world of an anchorless power." But...

I am not ready to die.

Nor am I, she returned the sentiment. There is too much left to do in this life.

"Undoubtedly," he rumbled back, marveling at her. "You have rekindled me," he murmured openly, feeling moved to the point that his tail began to wag. "Broken, does not fit me in this moment, with you, and it shall never fit me again," he vowed, but there was something more there too, something unspoken and lost deep in the rooted stoicism of his face:

I need you.

As the wind picked up around them, Saena drew her eyes to the sky, and noted the unhappy twist of clouds aggregating. When Warbone's dulcet voice cut through the crying air again, she scooped her ears toward him to hear, but was unable to prevent the comical battering of the wind that lent her a more youthful aspect. His explanation fell in line with hers more than she could believe. Indeed, for a little while, she was suspicious that his story was too similar, but in Warbone, Saena found a kindred spirit, and the feeling was short-lived.

"Water is thicker than blood," she opined darkly. It was a belief she held now, having been betrayed by so many. Junior left, only to die before she could return. Pura left. Reek left, though she'd been the cause of that, because she could not forgive him his transgression. Everyone else had left, as well, but she didn't know it, only suspected. While Saena's memories of her parents was a fog in her mind, attempting to recall them only left her with a sour taste in her mouth. She didn't remember them, and she wasn't sure she wanted to, either. There was a reason they weren't with her now. She didn't hold the same opinion toward her children, but every other member of her family that she remembered was gone, and Warbone seemingly had his own problems with family.

"I'm sorry," she said, and that was all she could really say. She felt his pain. Silver Creek had not betrayed her, no more than she had betrayed them, but the bite of it stung nonetheless. Saena was not made to follow, nor made to compromise on her own brand of authority. She believed in rigid hierarchy, and respect for leaders, and was unwilling to change any of that, and if she knew how very far her pack had slipped, her decision would be made for her already. "Mine did not betray me, but nor did they respect the work I'd done for them enough to return my command to me," she summarized. She still felt Silver Creek was hers, and she still felt it should have been given to her the moment she returned, lucid. But it wasn't, and she was no longer confident she should go back but to say her farewells.

The wind gusted and her eyes lifted again to the darkening skies. She shifted, restless, as Warbone claimed to be rekindled. The faintest hint of a smile lifted her features. While she didn't understand what she'd done, she felt likewise, or at least the animalistic side of her felt likewise. She turned sidelong, aimed a playful nip at him as she swept by, and paused at another edge of the mountain. The way down was rugged but not impossible, and at the bottom lay the autumn vale she'd been eyeing before. The clouds were blowing in, her heart was alight with an untamed fervor, and she was tempted to try her luck.

To fall along the way would be death, or as good as. But should they make it, it was irrefutable proof that the wild was not done with them. Saena swung her head around, fixing an eye on Warbone's scarred visage, and tempted, "race me."

this is just a bunch of introspective nonsense and really only the last paragraph relates to anything at all xD

With their past lives laid out, like a trail of broken glass— dirty, cracked, and reflecting dully back at them— their sympathy for one another was taken up on the wind and swept away by an autumnal draft that cut through the Sunspires like a dull razor. It was no longer about the beaten boat they shared, or the relentless battering they faced by the ceaseless tide of an impending Death. For of course they would die, and there stood no reason to wonder how, or if they should expedite the process, but rather the true question lie in what they die as, when the time did come.

For Warbone, no longer feeling as lost as he had an hour prior, the similarities between them had transformed into a bracing and near-blinding beacon. His fervent obsession with the Willows was now abated, having found himself completely irrational in that pursual. His ferocity  on the matter had formed the imperiously weighted prospect of disemboweling each present Marauder, one by one, until he could reclaim the land again; but it was this sort of dementia that had caused him to subconsciously crawl up into the cold cradle of the mountains, and seek his premature end.

There was no such end in sight, now, his remaining eye transfixed on the small woman who had served to remind him of his feral pride— his innate fixation on survival— and his ability to accomplish whatever he wanted. Warbone was arrogant enough to believe he could take the Keep, even on his own (with due diligence and chary tactics); it was his purest and most malignant infatuation.

But in him too, was a distended degree of honor. He did not regard many things with such levity, but he could not in good consciousness uproot the lives of so many others for his own selfish attainment. It was easier now to imagine that he would survive the entire pack, and claim it when their love for the land had waned, as his never would.

His irrationality was disturbed by the coltish nip at his shoulder. His attention refocused, and his face followed her movements in silent eagerness. He watched her hungrily, reined back by an uncertainty for her next move. Was she leaving him now? Had she already accomplished the role she had come to serve in his life? He was not a believer in such things as fate, but he had come to recognize long ago that everyone served a purpose; only rarely did they serve him.

He watched her peering down into the Vale, his heart thrumming wildly in anticipation of her next move. The predator wanted desperately to chase her, reading the radiating language of her body even before she turned to him with verbal encouragement. Warbone, powerful in all his bronzed mass, curved his claws against unyielding rock and gravel, propelling himself after her in physical acceptance of the challenge. Their descent was overly swift; wolves careening down the sheer face of their first trial together, as animals seeking to revert to their most basic elements. And only by the end of race would it determine if they deserved only to be bloodied and broken piles of flesh and bone, or if they were meant still to fight, and feed, and fornicate.

Warbone found a rhythm, leaping, charging, and skittering after her. The wind cared little for their balance, and the rocks even less as the terrain varied in its attempts to throw either of them off balance and to an uncertain doom. But the wolf felt nothing but exhilaration— an unadulterated joy that came from living in his most natural state— finally able to forget completely the emotion of loss and politics. He knew only that he wanted to catch the lurid sylph ahead of him, and he would die in his pursuit of her, if only he could extend the feeling a bit longer...

There was a flutter in Saena's chest as she hung at the precipice, staring down at the rough path to the tree-swathed vale, a clinch of fear in her belly. But with her emotions thrown away for the moment, and with the weight of tasks yet undone lifted from her back for just this moment, fear had no place in her. Self-preservation took root as she took her first step, and with Warbone hot on her heels, she plunged headlong down the side of the mountain.

The blood pounding through her veins was as fire, and her legs coiled and sprang, well-oiled and alive as they had never been. Saena was ever one for endurance over speed, and her body responded to this newest challenge with all the suppleness of new, soft leather. She sprang from outcropping to outcropping, trusting her instincts. Her paws found footholds where only dark shadow seemed to hide. Her body twisted agilely and lithely as she hurtled along, faster than she thought she'd ever run, and it was as though her brain was ten steps ahead the entire time. Her fears, doubts, and self-loathing was left behind on the top of the mountain.

Warbone was near. She could hear the thunder of his paws and the sound of his breath hitching at the great drops they prevailed over. At times, she swore she could feel his breath, warm and fierce, on her flank. But the wind snatched away any words she might have shouted in their wild descent, and even when she reached the bottom—sore, surely, and aware of muscles she'd never known existed as her blood rushed through them and her whole being seemed to thrum—she was unable to speak as her feet hit the prickly grass of the vale and she jogged to a slow. She swung her head around, seeking Warbone, hoping that the trial by fire they'd just jumped into had not claimed his life, for she was alive with the hot and heady rush of exhilaration and wasn't ready to let her emotions back in.

She would bring her daughters home. Her confidence returned tenfold, and soon she would go to Larksong Grotto and demand that they be returned to her, and would be joined by others, unbeknownst to her... but first, she wanted to drink deep of the animal courage that recklessness gave her, and Warbone seemed to be the expert in that.

They came bounding off the summit's pedestal, pawpads rejoicing as cold rock at last gave way to yielding loam. The racing predators broke here to catch their breath, Warbone using his only eye to take in their surroundings. His scanning was more out of habit than anything— he could not truly take in the vale, not when every nerve in his body compelled him to pay singular attention to her.

She whirled to face him, her blue eyes too deep and emphatic for his comprehension. But rather than finding himself exhausted by the prospect of exploring her depths, he was exhilarated by it. For after spending years being unable (or unwilling) to connect on a level beyond superficial, this was a task he welcomed; a calling he wished to answer. Their ignited kinship, to him, felt to be the catalyst to a life he truly wanted. He had slithered into the crags to die, only to have found a reason to live.

"Warbone," he panted— heat rolling off his skin in waves— moving closer to her so that he might feel her warmth too. His alone was not enough to sate the beast, not  now that it had reared out of its deathly slumber. His body was numb and vibrating, agonizing that he was not yet spent. "A hunt!" he trumpeted abruptly, unable to quell the adrenaline coursing through his veins, and needing an outlet for his renewed spirit.

And there was no unwillingness between them; no obvious intent to separate. There was much chasing to be done still, though who was to say if they would spend more time chasing each other, or actual prey.

Fade?

Her breath came in huffs and puffs as she attempted to modulate her body temperature, but the sheer exhilaration of rushing down a mountain, coupled with the fact she hadn't run quite like that in a long time, made it damn near impossible. Saena was riding a high that she didn't know how to handle. The male grated out a word that she took as an introduction. "Saena," she breathed back even as he closed the distance somewhat. Her expression was a questioning one in that instant. What would he do?

She could go for another run. Or a fight. Or a good, hard fuck. Her blood was hot and rushing beneath her skin, and restlessness consumed her enough that she almost did advance toward him in an effort to initiate something.

As sudden as a summer storm, Warbone proposed a hunt. She was ever so slightly disappointed—animalistic desires were suggesting a different sort of hunt—but she nodded in approval nonetheless. A hunt was an excellent way to burn the excess energy, and besides, it would keep her mind off her girls and Reek a little longer. She turned with Warbone in pursuit of some prey animal or another, of which there were many in the vale—though perhaps it was all moreso a pursuit of her kindred spirit than any sort of hunger. When at last they did part, whether successful in their endeavors or not, it was with a promise that she would return to the vale, hopefully with her daughters in tow.