Northstar Vale [m] Once Upon a Dream

He waited somewhere between tolerance and impatience for her disappearance, but above most of it, he was simply relieved to know she had come back. Her scent was fresh enough, but he had begun to doubt the truth of the trail before he saw movement within the shadow of the den. It was followed by a bark, soft and fatigued. The dragon's brows knitted together, and he slowly drew towards the den. His skin quaked with a slight chill, despite the warmth of the spring day. There were many questions he would ask of her - where had she gone and why, what had she done to exhaust herself enough to seek the shelter of this den, and not her own, let alone even reporting to the remainder of the pack on her return?

Raheerah hovered at the entrance, gazing down at the female curled up within the shadows of her nest. A desire to touch, to smell, to experience her again overwhelmed the beast. He dropped into a crouch and edged towards her, inching closer to her body, enough to try and press his nose into the loam of her ear. But in doing so, he caught not only her scent, but another. As his nose lingered near the side of her face, it twitched, filled with the aroma of his light and the unfamiliar musk of a male.

Confusion led him to freeze, trying to analyze what he was experiencing. It wasn't strange to smell other wolves on his packmates. Even Xi'nuata carried the perfume of their packmates from time to time. But the scent was different from all of those. It belonged to a wolf he did not recognize and, even more bewildering, it carried with it the hot sting of hormones within his nostrils. It was a combination he found all too discomforting and quickly enough he realized what it meant. A rumbling emerged in his throat. It was slow at first, quiet, but multiplied in its strength as his jaws slowly opened with the drawing back of his lips. Lips that twitched, fangs that had damn nearly wrapped around her neck before he wrenched himself away from her. It was all he could do to keep himself from tearing into her.

Raheerah stepped back from the den, a low thunder persisting in his chest as he stared at his wife, teeth bared, as if caught in the process of lunging. But he kept himself at bay, trying to organize his mind amid a cloud of furious and confused thoughts. He didn't want to hurt her, but every instinct begged for him to act in his fury; instead, he steeled himself, lost in his own internal frenzy.