Blacktail Deer Plateau dig up your mother, chew on her bones

Takes place a few days after Junior's burial; this presumes that she as buried next to Pied as suggested, but I can change that detail. I would love for a member of his family to find him.

Junior had gone to ground. The grief of the Plateau wolves was stifling, so thick in every breath that by now, even Pura understood what was going on. Those were Junior's ears, but something had eaten away her face and body. He noted her absence, but shock did not settle on him as it had on Saēna and Tytonidae, both of whom had taken themselves away into mental planes where Junior still ruled the roost. For Pura, she was just gone, and the world kept on turning.

He watched them bury her, like he had buried remnants of dinner so many times before. The faces around him vacillated between distraught and utterly empty, but Pura's expression remained one of mild interest throughout.

The phrase 'bury her near Pied' had come up a few times, and it didn't take him long to figure out that the disturbed earth near Junior's final resting place concealed something interesting. When the other wolves eventually departed, he remained, and would continue to visit several times over the next two days.

Then one dry, overcast morning, he walked up to the dual graves - and began to dig.

The earth that covered Junior was not as compacted as the neighbouring grave, and it was her bones that he unearthed first. Decay had wilted the two ears, and the whole bundle was beset by hungry bugs and an awful, wet stink. Pura wrinkled his nose, discarded the leg bone in his mouth after only a few chews, and scrambled out of the shallow hole. After a moment's thought, he toddled towards the second grave.

Pied took much longer to dig up. The earth was hard, compacted by rain and paws, and it took over an hour before he had unearthed anything at all. By that point, Pura's paw-pads were raw, but the leathery smell of late-stage decay pushed him on.

Eventually, he had a hind leg. It was longer than his - a grown-up's leg by all accounts - and partially wrapped in leathery, black skin. There was still hair on it, but not much. Pura appraised it for a long moment, passing his cold, metallic gaze over the angular hock and the naked, skeletal paw.

Before slaver had a chance to form, he seized his dead mother's femur and began to chew.

Fireblaze was wondering around, trying to find her grave, when she scented Pura. Racing forward, she saw Pura chewing on a bone, presumably Pied's. "Pura," she asked. "What are you doing here all alone?"

Sitting down after she walked to him, she watched him intently, trying to find out what he was doing. "I'm so sorry about Osprey, Pura."

Let me know if you mind the power play, Karm. :)

Following his daughter's burial, Peregrine did something he hadn't done in nearly a week: he slept. In fact, he slept for two days straight and only rose on the third to eat, drink and toilet before returning to his spot beneath the sycamore tree and slipping back to the land of nightmares and dreamscapes. Sleeping was his escape from his bleak reality, even if there was nothing more painful than those first few moments after waking, when his groggy amnesia gave way to horrifying recollection. It was like reliving that moment, when Blue Willow had returned with Osprey's remains, over and over again...

He woke now and lay for a while, giving himself time to recover from the onslaught of grief. Finally, Peregrine pushed himself to his feet. He wasn't the only one who was coping by lying around like roadkill. He saw a few members of his family curled up nearby. He knew they needed him and his strength, especially the pups. He knew they weren't taking the news well. For now, though, they slept peacefully and he was loath to disturb them. Quietly, he found his feet and slipped into the forest.

He went almost directly to the grave, his first visit since the burial itself. He was hoping to have the spot to himself but Peregrine wasn't surprised to find two other pack wolves lingering there. What was surprising was the sight of the freshly dug earth and the bone presently held between his young son's paws. Peregrine froze at the edge of the two graves, staring at this macabre scene, for what felt like years.

He felt a disgusted rage building with him and he could tell that he was one blink away from snapping. Peregrine exercised a miraculous amount of restraint in that moment, not that anyone would ever know. Rather than step forward, tear the remains from Pura's grasp and beat him for his terrible behavior, he stepped almost mechanically past Fireblaze, ignoring her completely, and gently tugged the bone away from Pura.

"Pura," he said softly, "these are the bones of your mother and your sister. This is all we have left of them. Digging them up was bad. Chewing on them was very bad. We do not eat our own kind. Do you understand me, son? Do you understand?" He paused, feeling himself trembling slightly. "You're going to help me rebury them. And you will never, never do this again. Do you read me, Pura?"

Pura chewed slowly, methodically, watching Peregrine with placid, malice-free eyes. To Fireblaze he said nothing; she approached as if she had not seen the desecrated graves, nor the wolfish paw at the end of the bone in his mouth. Perhaps the dead were not so sacred in her world.

"Pura. These are the bones of your mother and your sister. This is all we have left of them. Digging them up was bad. Chewing on them was very bad."

Peregine tugged at the bone, and Pura obediently let go of it. As much as the wiring in his brain allowed, he was very fond of his second father and leader - the creature largely responsible for maintaining order at Blacktail Deer Plateau, even with his heart so freshly ripped out of his chest.

"Bad," Pura repeated diligently, brows furrowing in mild disappointment - in himself. He lack the innate mechanism that would have forewarned him of the beastliness of his actions, and it annoyed him that Peregrine had to step in to fill the role of an instinct that everyone else seem to possess.

"And you will never, never do this again. Do you read me, Pura?"

Pura rose from the disturbed earth. Peregrine was disappointed in him. Factually, he knew that, but there was no accompanying sting in his chest. Ty and Saēna either sulked or threw a tantrum when their father admonished them, and he had watched their body language - ears flat, shoulders slumped. He mimicked this posture now, averting his eyes and murmuring: "S-s-orry.. for be bad." Slowly, carefully, he reached two wide, soiled paws forward to pull the dirt back over his mother's leg, and patted it smooth.

Fireblaze felt odd in this family situation. Backing away slowly, she sat by a tree a short distance away. Peregrine talked to Pura, explaining that it was bad to do that. Fireblaze would have done the same, but she was not family, and she was new.

Watching both of them, she remembered her mom telling her the same thing, when Fireblaze had dug up a dead siblings forepaw. Tears welling up in her eyes, she blinked.

Sorry for the wait!

If Peregrine still bit back on his anger, it dissipated significantly at the boy's stuttered but authentic apology. "Pura," he said very wearily, though he wasn't sure what he wanted to say. He paused for a long moment before continuing, "Thank-you for apologizing. I know you didn't mean to be bad. I still need you to understand that we treat the bodies of wolves as sacred. Do you know what sacred means?"

The Alpha male hardly glanced at Fireblaze as she retreated. She didn't matter at all right now. This was a difficult and delicate situation between himself, Pura and their dead. His dusky blue-green eyes remained fixed on the freckled boy's face, waiting for the anticipated answer so that he could explain. As the primary father figure in Pura's life, he was well aware of the youngster's mental shortcomings and he would make a firm but gentle point of ingraining this particular lesson in him.

Pura experienced the social world through a thick, white fog. There were no sharp edges, no colours, no heat. There wasn't much of anything, actually. He couldn't feel what his sister felt - or Peregrine, who stood before him now with an expectant look in his eyes and the word sacred. Somewhere in the background, Fireblaze slunk away into the forest. Pura took several slow steps away from Pied's broken grave and sat down.

"No," he responded after contemplating his own paws for a couple of minutes, glancing up at the Alpha male. Do you understand and do you know were questions he knew well - but sacred was not in his vocabulary.

Since Fireblaze isn't actively participating (and no longer part of the pack), I'm going to forge ahead. *rude* :P

Just as he expected, Pura said that he didn't know the meaning of the word. "It means special, very special. If something is sacred, you treat it with respect. I know you know what that means. There are a few things that are sacred in life—life itself is sacred—and the bodies of our dead loved ones, as well as the ground where we buried them, is one of them."

Peregrine kept it short, so as not to overwhelm the boy. He wanted Pura to understand and remember. He kept his eyes trained on the freckled pup, trying his best not to glance sideways at the slobber-slathered remains that insulted every fiber in his being.

Slowly but surely, the pieces were settling into position, like dust falling slowly to cover the floor of an abandoned house. Pura's emotional deficiencies necessitated clear and precise instruction - particularly when it came to a subject that relied so heavily on gut feeling. He nodded slowly along with Peregrine, his freckled nose scrunching up with effort as he began to make connections.

"Nana.. s-sacred," he told his leader firmly, staring up with big, expectant eyes. Though it had birthed him, Pura had no connection to the large body that lay half-exposed in the grave behind him, but Saēna was a very obviously important part of his life.

Perhaps because he wasn't in the best state of mind, Peregrine didn't quite understand the connection Pura was trying to make. His face puckered quizzically for a moment before he eventually cottoned on to the boy's meaning. "Saēna? Yes, Saēna's sacred. You and I are sacred too, Pura," he added. "All of us here, alive or dead, are sacred."

Wordlessly, the Alpha male motioned for Pura to help him dig. Peregrine intended to do the lion's share—not only because he was larger and stronger but because he wanted to finish this task as quickly as possible—and he hunkered beside Pura, rump in the air and forelegs churning the earth to reopen the hole and, eventually, recover the exhumed remains.

"Saēna? Yes, Saēna's sacred."

Pura nodded - quickly this time, because he actually understood. When Peregrine began to dig, he copied, thinking sacred, sacred, sacred with each swipe of his soiled paws. When the graves had been restored and their dead rested under soft, fresh earth, a rainstorm of that single, silently repeated word had saturated the earth.