Blacktail Deer Plateau rolling rock

Anybody is welcome (even outsiders, as this takes place on the border).

Kissing her beau goodbye, Fox made her way to the outermost limits of the plateau. It had been quite some time since she had busied herself with patrols, but it seemed a good way to get to know the lay of the land. She could only hope that she didn't run into Hawkeye. It didn't occur to her that she might have gone with Ferdie, considering her children were here. And, despite their differences, Fox would not interfere with the mother. It was not her right to do so. As long as that wretched Von Pelt was far, far away, Fox didn't give a damn one way or the other.

Her legs took her swiftly to the borders, eyes scanning for any threats as she occasionally rubbed herself on a tree to mark it. Fox's markings would be fewer and further between that Perry and Willow's, but they would be there. She wanted others to make no mistake about her new position here. And if somebody had a problem with it, they could take it up with her. Or leave. She didn't mind either way. Peregrine wasn't going anywhere, and Fox could count a number of wolves already whom she did not think would leave.

Kaihra traced the borders more often now and watched the flatlands below with steady eyes. Her thoughts had become less cluttered since the meeting, but her apprehension against their new Beta remained strong. She had seen Fox on and off the past few days, but only from afar: the red girl always seemed to be with company, whether with Peregrine or with another packmate who had stumbled across her moments before. At first Kaihra had resisted the thought of speaking to Fox, but memories of her birth pack swam in her mind. She had been young then, inexperienced and naive. She had trusted wolves because her father had, and she'd been content to accept those he deemed worthy with a wag of her tail. Now she knew better, and Kaihra would not make the same mistake again.

She saw the fiery girl before she caught whiff of her scent, which still lingered with traces of her former pack. Kaihra slowed her pace, tasting other wolves on the air, but their scents hung staler than Fox's. The dark wolf almost froze. Her eyes, ears, and nose could not deceive her at once - the red girl walked alone. Keeping her tail low, Kaihra gave no time for doubts to form in her mind. Though her stomach churned, she knew what she needed to do. But she would be careful. "Anything out there?" She called as she approached the new Beta. She threw her gaze to the horizon before flashing her attention back toward the fiery girl.

With Atticus in some kind of... living death, Fox worried that it might spread to others. She had already been watching Peregrine and Osprey closely, since they had spent the most time with him. There was Blue Willow, too, although Fox tended to keep her distance from the Alpha. Fox even tried to determine if she was somehow losing herself, and she wondered if perhaps it was all in Atticus's head. Maybe the living death was nothing more than some serious trauma that he could not bear to comprehend.

Fox's eyes darted to a crunching of ground debris, and she quickly spotted one of her newfound pack-mates. "Anything out there?" the girl asked, and Fox shook her head. “No threats to speak of.” Of course, Fox knew that there were threats further away than her eyes could see. She considered The Sunspire to be one of them. Idly, she wondered if the creek would be considered a threat now... or if the creek now considered the plateau to be some kind of threat. Had Bazi even told them where she had gone? Fox turned her attention back to the conversation at hand.

“Since I’m sure you already know who I am, may I get your name?” she asked. Fox couldn't remember if the girl had been at the announcement meeting or not, but she assumed so. If not, surely the news had spread by other means.

Kaihra watched the girl carefully, as interested in her actions as she was in her reply. Having already checked the flatlands herself, the fiery girl confirmed what Kaihra had already observed as truth. Yet Fox followed her words with a short pause, and Kaihra briefly wondered what ran through the Beta's head. The dark wolf silenced her mind from speculation before her thoughts could tear through the dam she'd built against them. She couldn't let paranoia grasp her now. She needed to keep her thoughts as unbiased as possible if she wanted this to work.

As Fox turned the conversation on her, Kaihra gave a dip of her head. "Kaihra." She replied. At the gathering, Kaihra thought the girl's size had simply been dwarfed by the towering forms of Peregrine and Blue Willow, but she now realized Fox stood even shorter than herself. She looked young, too, and couldn't have been a day over two. Kaihra could see the scars that laced her body more clearly now, and she wondered what she had done to receive them.

"Peregrine mentioned you'd been Alpha of another pack." She flicked her gaze just off Fox's eyes and kept her body clearly submissive. She wondered for a fleeting moment if her remark had sounded blunt to the red girl's ears, but she knew she couldn't wait around for small talk to pass. Wariness already tugged at her fur, and if she didn't speak now, Kaihra wasn't certain she ever would.

Kaihra. Fox stowed it away for future use, but she knew names were slippery in her mind. They tended to disappear when she needed them most unless they were used often. Perhaps if Kaihra stuck around, her name would be used often by the young leader. Fox was forgetful, and it was one of her many downfalls. Nobody could dispute the fact that the yearling was full of ambition, but that did not mean she lacked faults. She was not afraid of her faults, nor did she always acknowledge them. They simply were.

“He did not lie,” replied Fox. Two could play at the "make statements that are actually questions" game, and Fox was a rather good opponent. But this was not the time, nor the place for such things. These new comrades needed to be reassured of their new leader, and Fox folded her legs so that she now sat. “My former Beta and I fought for the crown, and she won it. I told her she could take the whole thing.” The yearling did not tell lies, just as her mate did not, but she was also not in the business of telling whole truths. Fox still thought of Bazi from time to time, although the thoughts were soured with the white girl's inability to see that things weren't always as simple as they seemed.

While Fox sat, Kaihra stood. The same wariness that had met her at the meeting now burned through every vein in her body, and she restrained her brow from furrowing as she focused her ears on trapping every word of the femme’s reply. The red girl spoke without blunder, and her words flowed seamlessly from her lips. Either Fox had regular practice at fabrication or she spoke with such confidence because she really told the truth. Both options unsettled her. If the words she spoke were lies, then Kaihra would leave the Plateau without second thought. But if Fox spoke the truth, would her decision really be much different? She would honor Fox for her honesty, but if something were to happen to Peregrine and Blue, and Fox took charge… Kaihra felt her stomach twist. If the fiery girl had been overthrown once, would she be able to keep it from happening again?

And that wasn’t all. Why had Fox’s Beta seen it fit to overthrow her? What troubles had the red girl caused? What faults made her lead with slippery paws, what had she done to deserve such blatant mistrust from her packmate? Had her Beta been simply unwilling to settle for second best? Why did Peregrine trust the girl so readily? On and on the questions swirled and tumbled through her mind and cut a silence through the air that Kaihra barely registered. Had such thoughts run through her father’s mind when he had tested the wolves back home? Is that what busied him day after day and made his forehead crease even in his slumber? How had he failed to see?

Kaihra suddenly felt very small before the girl. She thought she had things under control, but her mental dam had been leaking the entire time. Quietly, she said the only words she knew could muster, the only ones that heaped all her concerns into one. ”Why should I trust you?” Her voice stung the summer air with a chill she’d not meant to let slip, but all she could do now was curse herself for not being more careful.

Fox could only begin to imagine all the thoughts that were going through Kaihra's head. But she did not dare try to understand what she was thinking. Doing so often only made the Beta paranoid and worsened things, so she did her best to keep her mind occupied with other thoughts and open for whatever the girl had to say next. Instead, she focused on the girl's fur, dark as it was, and the way her chest rose and fell with each breath. Taking notice of these things allowed Fox to occupy her thoughts in other areas.

“Trust comes with time,” replied Fox. “I do not expect you to trust me now, after you’ve only just met me. I realize I have much to prove.” Fox did not think that she would be able to convince anybody in one sitting (or even a dozen) that she could be trusted. It was obvious that some wolves of the creek had never truly trusted her. And yet... Fox knew there were some who had put their lives in her hands paws, and she had done the best that she could. Sure, she had made mistakes, but what real wolf did not? It was only in fairy tales that things went according to plan, after all, and Fox found those stories boring and lacking substance.

Fox gave her no reason to stay, but she gave her no reason to leave, either. The red girl simply gave her a reason to wait. For all her apprehension, Kaihra knew she would never be able to predict how Fox's leadership would effect the pack, and all the answers in the world could not prepare her for the troubles the red girl could bring. Everything within her shouted to run, yet under all her misgivings and fears, a quiet part of her urged her to wait. Her thoughts called her foolish every moment she stayed, but Kaihra could not forget the feeling of something so different she'd felt when she first laid eyes on the land, a hope she'd not felt since before leaving her parents in the North. A frown twitched across Kaihra's face.

Kaihra shifted her weight and lowered herself until she sat before her Beta, still not daring to meet her eyes. "How many have left?"

“The plateau?” Fox asked, though she did not wait for Kaihra to clarify, “None… that I know of. As you can imagine, I haven’t had time to meet the whole lot of my new comrades. Peregrine has made no mention of any announced departures, though it's always possible somebody slipped out without us noticing.” It was only when their scents dwindled that Fox was sure anybody had left her pack. Except, of course, in the cases where it was announced or they were taken from her. She thought of Bones, and how it would always bring a rather unpleasant feeling to her gut.

And even though nobody had strayed from the plateau to her knowledge, she did not expect that to be the final outcome. Large changes in a pack could often mean that some of them decided to disperse. “What made you decide on the plateau as your home, Kaihra?” Fox asked, merely curious. If she expected to trust Fox, the feeling would have to go both ways. The yearling had found that the easiest way to gain somebody's trust (and to give it) was to become more familiar with one another.

Kaihra had not realized the vagueness in her words, but the fiery girl understood. While Fox's reply did not soothe her nerves entirely, it did make her pounding heart beat a little bit slower. If no one had left the pack yet, that meant most still clung to some strand of hope for stability through these tumultuous times. A pack's strength lay in the loyalty of its members, not its size. If such a large pack stood together in a time like this, surely that meant they could walk toward the future with certainty in their paws - unless her packmates were simply biding their time until they could right the wrong they felt had been committed here.

Kaihra stopped the thought before it could run further. "I grew up in a land like this." She turned her eyes away from Fox to look back toward the packlands. "The height of the land, paired with the mountains at back, protects our pack from external threats. As long as we stand as one, our pack will be strong and we will have little to fear." For the first time she tasted a tang of hypocrisy in her words. She doubted Fox's motives, mistrusted Peregrine's judgment, and constantly wondered if her packmates were as loyal as they made themselves to be. Of all wolves, who was she to talk about standing united when her own thoughts divided her from those she called pack?

It seemed as though Kaihra had come here because the landscape was familiar and she thought it to be well-guarded against other packs. Fox, who had just spent two seasons ruling the creek, had never even considered landscape. She did, however, know that both territories were well-equipped to sustain several wolves, and that was the prime criteria for herself. While Fox had not chosen the plateau (or the creek, really), she thought that it had that going for it.

“You chose it based on the land, not on the wolves who lived here,” Fox said, thinking aloud. She found this peculiar, especially since Kaihra seemed to distrust others. Fox would have thought that the girl would have put more weight in the wolves that lived in a land, rather than the earth beneath her feet. “I would be a liar if I said that most wolves could be trusted,” Fox told Kaihra, “Much of my time at the creek was spent weeding out the untrustworthy.” And although Fox did not realize it, Bazi had picked up the job somewhere along the line and decided her own Alpha was one of those untrustworthy creatures.

The flaw in her decision had been subconsciously apparent to Kaihra, but having her foolishness be realized by another wolf made her blink in surprise. You chose it based on the land, not on the wolves who lived here. Kaihra felt a flush of heat as the red girl's comment nestled deep in the circus of her mind, and for once her thoughts fell silent. For once she had nothing to say, because Fox had brought to light the very truth Kaihra had done well to repress.

She suddenly felt very exposed and very foolish before her Beta, and she felt her ears tilt backward. She'd let her emotions guide her here and now she stood to wonder if she'd bound herself to the pack or merely the land beneath their paws. Though it seemed Fox shared in her mistrust of other wolves, the red girl's words proved far more rational than Kaihra's thoughts had ever been, and the dark girl couldn't help but feel a twinge of jealousy toward her Beta. "How did you lead your pack without letting your suspicions overtake you?"

In some way, Fox felt like she had more in common with this lass than she had originally thought. Either that, or she really just liked calling others out on their verbal mistakes. Whatever the reason, it made Fox feel less threatened by Kaihra, and that was always a good thing (in her mind). If anything, Fox was pleased with the questions Kai was asking. It was more than anybody else had done, and it was refreshing to know that there was somebody willing to ask her the tough ones... even if the answers might not be what she was looking for.

“As well as I could,” Fox replied. “More often than not, my suspicions were correct.” Ferdie's... strangeness had been one of those suspicions, as Fox had never particularly liked the way that he had acted in certain situations. Jace had come out of nowhere, despite him informing Fox that he had some kind of made-up rage (as far as she was concerned). There had been Jinx, too, who had rallied her own and taken them away with her. “Not that I’m an expert on the subject, but I think it comes down to knowing those you are leading and ensuring that they know your expectations.”

Kaihra appreciated how calm the red girl kept herself in light of her suspicions. Fox had not shied from any of her questions, and Kaihra now felt a growing conviction she could take the Beta at her word. A part of her still resisted, reminding her it was too soon to tell, but she filed the voice away and allowed some of her wariness to drop from her bones.

Fox's reply did not thrill the dark girl, but she knew the truth in her Beta's words. Kaihra had hoped for a way to determine the character of her packmates before approaching them, but it was becoming clearer and clearer that that would always be a mere fantasy. If she ever wanted to quiet her fears, she would need to know her packmates on level much deeper than mere appearance. Though she did not share Fox's responsibility of leading the pack, Kaihra knew her alphas expected her to learn to live in mutual trust with her new packmates, and while she had known this since before her arrival on the Plateau, she had done little to fulfill her responsibility here. Perhaps now was the time to start.

"I see." came the sum of her thoughts. Her mind still churned with Fox's words. "So what are your expectations?"

"So what are your expectations?" Fox paused, rolling the question around in her head and taking some time to consider it. “Respect, when it is due. Regular contributions to the pack. Making yourself useful.” It seemed simple, innate, to Fox. She felt as if she had always known what she was expected to do for her pack. Perhaps somewhere along the lines it had gotten confused, and perhaps she was not always the best at being selfless, but she did understand its importance.

“And yours?” she asked of Kaihra. Obviously, this particular lady had some very specific ideas on what she wanted in a leader. Either that or she was just suspicious of everybody. Fox wasn't sure which of those was true, but in either case, Fox did want to know what her followers expected out of her. Perhaps it had been a mistake she had made back in Swiftcurrent Creek.

Kaihra let Fox's words sink in deep. Though what the Beta expected of her packmates were matters of common sense, they had receded from the forefront of Kaihra's priorities as she had allowed her uncertainty to take root in their place. The dark wolf felt a prickle of anxious guilt as she began to realize how little she had been pulling her weight, and swore to herself to double her efforts in the upcoming weeks to make up for the time she had lost.

"And yours?" Kaihra paused as Fox returned her question. She only knew how her parents had led, and the expectations they had placed on her and her brothers while they still lived within their borders. Though they had been strong, Kaihra knew they had not been without their weaknesses. "Due respect and hard work should be the cornerstone of any pack." In those, her parents had excelled. Kaihra paused and tipped her head slightly to the right, her brow creasing as she thought. "But I would expect those who lead to have the humility to accept advice from those beneath, the selflessness to look past personal ties to see and do what is best for their pack, and the honour to speak every word with integrity." Even as her words fell, she wondered how much she herself had lived up to the expectations she set for her leaders.

Feel free to fade out with your next post if you'd like. :)

While Fox knew that she could not live up to those standards, she nodded anyway. They were good qualities (according to some), and she could understand why Kaihra wished for leaders who had them. Fox, on the other hand, was few of those things. But she did not think that made her a poor leader (or Kaihra a poor judge of what a leader should be). The young Beta allowed silence to settle over them for a moment, mulling over her thoughts as Kaihra surely did the same.

"Would you like to come with me for a patrol?" Fox asked. It would be a good way to get to know the lay of the land, something Fox was very keen on doing. In time, Fox imagined she would find her place here. For now, she was still in the midst of transition.

Sounds good, thanks for the thread! (:

The fiery girl met her response with a wanting nod. Though the Beta did not deny her standards, she did not confess to possess them, either, and Kaihra felt her worries trickle back. What would she risk by accepting Fox as Beta? And what would she risk by not? Fox had given her much to think about and this she appreciated and respected, but one interaction could not reveal the motives of a wolf. Even Fox believed that.

Kaihra hesitated at Fox's invitation, the weight of her decision settling in her chest. For a heartbeat longer she sat in unwavering silence before rising to her feet. She still had little trust for the red girl, but despite the churning in her stomach, she knew she couldn't keep running. Kaihra gave the fiery girl a dip of her head before she could second guess her decision and signalled for the Beta to lead the way.