Wapun Meadow How else would we find satisfactory meats to feed those sad, scrawny animals?

When a small shade with tall ears detached from the deeper shadows under the trees, he did so with a surreptitious glance at his surroundings. The coast was clear. Just how he'd come this far without being caught was a mystery for another time, but now that he was here, Aventus wasted no time slipping into the shadow of the valley's high walls. Another glance shot over his shoulder revealed no pursuers, so he scampered up the hill to the meadow beyond, keeping his shoulder tight to the wall as he went.

He didn't have long. By his childish estimate, Astara would be onto him before the sun reached its peak in the sky, and that time wasn't very far away. He quailed at the thought of what punishment she would dole out for his stepping outside the pack territory, but he was quickly becoming an independent and selectively defiant little imp. His sister was bold and brash and pushed boundaries day and night. By comparison, Aventus was sweet, meek and quiet and obedient... until everyone's attention was elsewhere, and then began his rumpus.

Now the fleet Bearberry scurried into the meadow and became lost within the tall grass which tickled his nose and brushed his flanks, eliciting nary a giggle to betray him.

hi you asked for a dissertation? coming right up

"we're so far from your home, phaedra," said the marten with stress harboured in his voice. 

"cain!" the girl whirled on him, squaring up with her slimline shoulders. "you said you knew the way back, do you or no?" she pinned her owl-light gaze on him, the rims of her eyes ajar with anxiety and her brow gathering at a seam between them. the thought of being lost in the wilderness made her stomach feel heavy with quicksand, sucking everything into its springe—

"no i do— i do. i just— your mum, father—"

"i am the las' thing on his mind, okay? he comes when the sun has chased all the colors from the sky and mama knows i go wanderin' round when he does. you promised me you could ge-ged me home afore they find oud—out. faugh!" she squeezed her eyes shut tightly and stomped a foot with frustration. would her tongue evermore be so clumsy? words that came to grownups so easily came to her like a carrier pigeon with a broken wing. it was an unfortunate symptom of some whelps' summerturn, though phaedra was admittedly struggling with it more than what was typical. the tension in her home helped none.  

"you know it's worse when you lose your nerve so calm down. i'll get you back to your family. i all’us get you home, don't i?" he whispered, sitting up to meet her height. "but if we go any further, it'll be high sun before we get there, so we need to—" his whiskers quivered. "get down!" caintigern demanded, using both his feet to force her head down and the rest of her into a crouch.

"cain? what?" she said at her normal pitch, peaking over the softrush with her large, pale ears pricked. 

"shhh! i saw something, get your head down!" he nipped her on the wither and she crumpled with a suppressed ow! spearing him with a sour look before trying to see between the grasses when the breeze parted them.

"uhff, i ain' see nothin." she brushed his concern off, and then a figure not unlike thade's (the last time she saw him, which failed to register in her mind) caught her eye; he was quietly playing in the tallgrass. a soft gasp slipped her mouth and phaedra lurched to her feet, stepping towards the boy when instantly she felt a sharp pain around her tail. she gritted her own to hushedly bear the needling teeth, glancing over her shoulder to find caintigern attempting to tow her back into the port of safety.

phaedra fixed him with a look that could cut down the eldest of trees; a torch passed from her mother. well, what used to be her mother. after papa, after thade, after everything, she was just a douted flame. a wick in a lantern—bereft in all possible ways. it was her flintstone that often more than not lit a spark in phaedra, for she was brash and irresponsible and altogether too ambitious for her own good.

so when she wheeled around to clock caintigern, her voice was low and her words were caged behind her teeth like deathrow prisoners. "i found him! i found wha'll make mama happy again. lemme go! now!" she insisted with a swing of her haunch, yanking her tail away from the marten's teeth and leaving tufts of stiff pale fur spilth upon the ground.

he chittered and huffed and backed into the grass, shaking his head like he always did when she was being a foolish child. he would stay, though. she knew that. he always waited.

a knell of laughter leapt from her throat. "thade!" she tripped over the grasses in her haste, but collected herself and wore on breathlessly. "thade, id's me! phae! oh thade!" she found her eyes involuntarily wet, tears winging from her eyes as she ran but jeweling her lashes. a phlegmy sob rattled in her throat. why was she crying when she was also smiling bright as morning gold? "thadey, i'm almos to you! mama, she misses you so muuu—" as she drew closer to his figure, her gaze realized this boy bared a resemblance to her brother hardly at all. her gait slowed. he was a few months her junior, and didn't have thade's features. from a distance, he was an inkblot child, and that had been enough for her. 

it had been enough.

folly was the hopeful, and false hope felt worse than despair. she wondered how she could've been so stupid. because i am bad, and hope was in there because it was bad too, probably the worst of them all, so spit-thick with malice it was to her own detriment, the martyrdom of her own heart. 

now only a yard stretched between them, and unsure if he'd run away from her, she stood sniffling all the snot back into her nose and dried her eyes and summoned the most self-assured posture she could muster, and yet she could not prevent the watery voice that welled forth when she tried to speak. "hi ... i'm sorr— i th-thoughd you was someone differen'." she sat down far across from aventus, dizzy from her run and nauseated from the headrush. the girl let her shoulders fall with demoralization. 

caintigern was right. she was mere a foolish child, and she couldn't bring happiness back to her mother, or papa for that matter, but he had spare happiness ... and mama had her. only her. on that mountain so hagridden, phaedra had asked caintigern to take her away for just one night so that she may feel what it's like to breathe gently again. 

and this is what it had gotten her.

Aventus snaked through the grass and wildflowers, the picture of a low-bellied reptile slithering unseen along the ground. Only he wasn't nearly as unseen as he thought he was. The sound of nearby voices was muffled at first and failed to draw his attention, but a chittering little voice rising in alarm made him crouch and go completely still.

There seemed to be a conversation happening nearby. One voice, the clear one, had a bit of a petulant note to it. The other was so garbled by squeaks and grunts that Aventus couldn't hope to make heads or tails of it. Granted, he couldn't make heads or tails of most wolves' speech, let alone a marten's. Let's just say having a mute mother doesn't do wonders for a kid's language acquisition timeline. Oh, he could speak a few words here and there, but he was rather behind other cubs his age in terms of vocabulary, which was only excused by his flawless pronunciation of the few words he did know.

Oh, right, back to the pair. The clear, ringing voice sounded excited and triumphant now. Aventus strained his ears to listen, picking out a few common words and guessing at the meanings of others. Mama sounded a bit like someone's name, so he concluded that the girl must be looking for someone. Not his business, truly... but he couldn't help leaning forward just a little, hoping to glean something interesting from their exchange. It wasn't like they knew he was th—

Aventus started violently when Phaedra abruptly appeared in front of him, crying and calling him Thadey. The hair on his scrawny back stood up like so many blades and he arched, stumbling a few steps away from her. Luckily, she didn't try to close the distance between them, but came to an equally abrupt stop and reconsidered. She sucked the snot back into her nostrils (disgusting creature) and arranged herself into what she surely thought was a dignified stance. She spoke, and Aventus did not respond.

Not verbally, anyway. His silvering eyes were fixated on Phaedra as she slumped to the ground. They traced the motes of gold woven into the longer hair that framed her face and draped down the sides of her shapely young neck. They rested on her pink-ass nose for a beat while he tried to remember if anyone else he knew had a nose like that, only to flicker up to her eyes, two soft sunrises set in a pale face. There his gaze remained, piercing and unwavering, the unnerving aspect of an intelligently watchful feline, while his tongue snaked eerily across his lips in some kind of bizarre, wordless greeting.

Or maybe it was just to acknowledge that there was a little bit of snot still clinging to hers. Who could tell?

so caught up in what she thought to be an emotional reunion between brother and sister, phaedra had failed to see the edgy manner in which the argyr-eyed child lurched away from her, hackles tipped to scruffy points all along his crescented, matchstick spine. once she'd slowed and blinked the pearls of saltwater from her lashes, the girl got the full measure of just how disparate he was from her brother; his wraithlike silhouette was neither thrifty nor even close to mettlesome, defining features of thade she'd got by heart. she felt a little bit sick in her throat.

although, the other boy did not run from her yet. crickets and cicadas chirred as deathly quiet fell between them. that and the rustling grass. phaedra's eyes unbidden followed his frisk of her, ears milling round her crown like swaying towers, until both pairs of eyes converged. her poise locked up involuntarily, unsure of what to do; she had never come across another puppy other than her brother and astraeus, but something inside her yearned for such an interaction. 

even so, aventus' silvern glim consumed her as if she was already bile in his belly, instilling a sense of restlessness in her eyes. she quickly glanced away towards the moon, then down to her pale toes. quite, she was a babe in the woods. meadow. whatever. her throat bribed her with a gulp to call for caintigern, yet ... she longed to master this uneasiness just as she had learned every fear by heart up to now. 

so she dredged her eyes up from her toes to regard him with more intestinal fortitude, even as his tongue prowled across his gums as some form of eldritch address or anticipation of oblation (dang, she knew she'd left something at home). k then. she didn't flinch. instead, she traced her tongue across her lips too (because she was nervous, but if in doing so she had returned some ineffable greeting, then hey, full marks for phaedra), focusing on the point between his eyes to keep her nerve. 

"i'm phaedra." the skarp whisper-shouted, unmoved from her station. she'd cast her mind back to the deer she'd named sieger, and how much the same he and aventus seemed presently. that helped her feel more at ease. what if he was just scared?

on the tail of that remark, she wondered louder: "hey, you know how d-d- play?" giving just an inch of optimism as her legs begged her closer. but she remained as one with the grass around her, save for her (not pink-ass) nose extending to snuff the air between them. 

Maybe he was just hungry.

His silver eyes were twin masks concealing his intentions, leaving him impassive and unreadable. If not for his upbringing, the notion that a cub could be any sort of enigma would've been laughable, but what should've been a face sparked with wonder and transparent awe was instead one christened in blood, haunted by horrors beyond most cubs' imagining. Though if Aventus realized his life and his behaviour both were highly unusual, there was no indication of it in his carefully composed features.

Yet even as veiled as his thoughts might be, there was no hiding the surprised lift of his tiny brows when Phaedra mimicked him. If she failed to notice that, then the sudden stir of his tail at his hindquarters, a brief and hesitant wag, betrayed him. She introduced herself. Aventus wasn't much of a speaker in uninitiated company, but he was not his mother, either. He understood spoken word even if his mastery of it was shaky at best, and behind other cubs his age. I have no idea if he even knows his name but even if he does, he wouldn't give it in return, because manners are for schmucks.

Once more, his tongue flickered up to touch the indented philtrum, wetting the bottoms of his nostrils. She raised her voice and he flinched, snatching back his ears like one might snatch a burned finger from a hot element, but they ventured forward again almost immediately. He focused on her absolutely pink-ass nose and, just as he had with Ico, parted his lips to silently pantomime her words back at her, uttering nary a sound. But the crooked line of a grin followed, the nearly imperceptible narrowing of his eyes, like he'd just told some excellent joke.

What would she do now? Evidently nothing, because some adult or another came marching up out of Ursus' valley and snatched him up by his scruff, paying no heed at all to the pale-haired girl as they toted the cowed Bearberry home.