Lone Star Mountain Who called me by my name and ran

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Everything. Warbone's chest swelled audibly, filling with bitter air and absinthal feelings at the genesis of her tale. His thoughts gave a dizzying swirl, leaving him dazed inwardly even as his body remained aware that he stood on what felt like the edge of the world— what might be the precipice of his very end. As she continued, his experience through her words could only be likened to being struck over and over again by swipes of searing hot metal.

My home was taken from me. The first bullet only grazed him, but it served to effectively take him from the initial ponderous concept of everything. His inner shock was noticeable, apparent in the way his only eye swiveled back to her face, zeroing in on the somber expression set there.

My pack was taken from me. The second winded him, stealing away all the air he had taken in at first, and leaving him suddenly without reprieve from the agony blossoming intensely at his breast. His gaze darted away, fleeing in dark asperity towards Marauder's Keep. His home— His pack— no more.

My children were taken from me. The third and final bullet started a fast and dangerous bleed, poisoning his thoughts of a future he had lost. No, not lost. Taken.

His own sister, in her acid mordancy and private vendetta, had taken from him everything he had built. Everything he had wanted. He could blame no one but her, and to some extent himself, but that did not save anyone else from the residual malice he felt about the situation. He wanted nothing more in that moment than to bound in flying leaps down the face of Lone Star Mountain, using the momentum to careen all the way to the Keep, and kill whatever kept him from his wants...

But they did not deserve to suffer because he was. There wasn't a single face in that pack he knew well, or at all, and everything he had once placed there in aim to build upon it, had been swept away in the months he had lost himself. Warbone emerged mentally from another bout of the five stages of grief, and accepted his meaningless position again, for about the third time this month.

But maybe he couldn't truly ever accept something like that. Having known and experienced his true calling, the bronze colossus could never comfortably live the life of a loner, and especially not a subordinate. He was a wolf born to reign; to own and defend all those under his stead. He was not meant to serve himself, and he certainly was not a wolf crafted to be a pawn, knight, or bishop. Warbone was made to be king— made to be first.

He could tell she was looking at him, and when he turned his head marginally, he indeed found her eyes; a pair of expressive blues, quietly imploring. He gazed back, openly searching her face for words that had not yet come to him. He was content to just look at her, lost and without any attempt to find his way. "I had fancied myself a shepherd once, and had gathered to me a flock that I loved fiercely. But today I stand, stripped of all that, of everything I had once held dear," he said, putting stress on the word that had taken him with her into this rabbit hole. "And with that has gone my identity. I know my name and I know where I've been, but...  what am I meant to do now? Where do you go when it feels as if there is nothing left?" He couldn't be truly asking, for surely she didn't know.

"Do you crawl up to the high crags to die, with the wild in your ears, calling.. begging us not to?" Even as he spoke it he realized that this might've been exactly why he'd been holed up here. For feeling impotent in the fact that he had no right or claim to challenge the wolves that had taken up residency of the Willows in his absence, had driven away his will to survive, though the instinct for it remained. His greatest pride had also been his greatest fall, and he sat there beside the pied she-wolf, wondering if he should even bother picking up the pieces.

"I am not ready to die," he relented after a quiet moment, with his eyes cast down over the cliff's edge, having decided that suicide (whether it be a quick jump or slow starvation) did not suit his image in the least.