Blackfeather Woods only a madman likes the pain

It hurt his heart to hear her thoughts of leaving. "Ah, to leave the forest..." he mused with a thoughtful frown. "But to go where?" He looked at Kendra, hoping to catch a glimpse on her face that betrayed whether she even knew where to go. She probably just wanted to leave, hoping that would leave the pain behind. Perhaps it would. Had his altercation with the white wolf been here, perhaps he would have felt the same.

Cicero often wished he had stopped it, but he knew that he had been unable to in the state he had been in at the time. He had needed time to prepare such a thing, so that he could have used his cunning. But it had all been planned above his head, and he had found out only the day it happened, when he had still been weak and unable to do much. Otherwise things could've been different; he could've told Burke and they could've deviced a plan. Hopefully one that would have kept all wolves in the pack — at the very least Damien. Cicero thought of a scenario where Burke would've kicked them all out on their asses, and where Cicero would've been able to keep Damien as a pet, locked away in the very same dungeons they once used to hurt Grimnir... The thought was enthralling, but he quickly pushed it from his mind to focus once more on Kendra's words.

"Potema intended to take the children," he explained. "They had little choice but to run. Cicero misses them dearly, but he feels that it is better that they are now elsewhere, safe." He hoped they were, anyway.

He closed his mismatched eyes briefly before he reopened them, remembering his own conflicting feelings when he was younger. "When Cicero was young, he used to think the forest was not for him, perhaps. That he were to be happier in a place that was lighter. Yet as he spent time in such lighter places, and as time came along, Cicero came to understand that he is a dark creature, capable of terrible things and with a mark of pain and violence in his being much alike that of the Brotherhood. His heart may wish for a different place to live, but his soul is foul and murky, like the swamps of his home. That is why he lives here still, despite wishing to leave often, and over time he has come to accept this darkness is a part of his life, and therefore Blackfeather Woods is a part of his life." He saw in Kendra the same darkness, and the same desire to leave. Perhaps she would better understand why she belonged in Blackfeather Woods, even if she did not believe in Mephala. Truthfully, he was not so sure he did, and if Mephala did exist, then she was probably eager to hurt her subjects.