Lone Star Mountain Who called me by my name and ran

this is just a bunch of introspective nonsense and really only the last paragraph relates to anything at all xD

With their past lives laid out, like a trail of broken glass— dirty, cracked, and reflecting dully back at them— their sympathy for one another was taken up on the wind and swept away by an autumnal draft that cut through the Sunspires like a dull razor. It was no longer about the beaten boat they shared, or the relentless battering they faced by the ceaseless tide of an impending Death. For of course they would die, and there stood no reason to wonder how, or if they should expedite the process, but rather the true question lie in what they die as, when the time did come.

For Warbone, no longer feeling as lost as he had an hour prior, the similarities between them had transformed into a bracing and near-blinding beacon. His fervent obsession with the Willows was now abated, having found himself completely irrational in that pursual. His ferocity  on the matter had formed the imperiously weighted prospect of disemboweling each present Marauder, one by one, until he could reclaim the land again; but it was this sort of dementia that had caused him to subconsciously crawl up into the cold cradle of the mountains, and seek his premature end.

There was no such end in sight, now, his remaining eye transfixed on the small woman who had served to remind him of his feral pride— his innate fixation on survival— and his ability to accomplish whatever he wanted. Warbone was arrogant enough to believe he could take the Keep, even on his own (with due diligence and chary tactics); it was his purest and most malignant infatuation.

But in him too, was a distended degree of honor. He did not regard many things with such levity, but he could not in good consciousness uproot the lives of so many others for his own selfish attainment. It was easier now to imagine that he would survive the entire pack, and claim it when their love for the land had waned, as his never would.

His irrationality was disturbed by the coltish nip at his shoulder. His attention refocused, and his face followed her movements in silent eagerness. He watched her hungrily, reined back by an uncertainty for her next move. Was she leaving him now? Had she already accomplished the role she had come to serve in his life? He was not a believer in such things as fate, but he had come to recognize long ago that everyone served a purpose; only rarely did they serve him.

He watched her peering down into the Vale, his heart thrumming wildly in anticipation of her next move. The predator wanted desperately to chase her, reading the radiating language of her body even before she turned to him with verbal encouragement. Warbone, powerful in all his bronzed mass, curved his claws against unyielding rock and gravel, propelling himself after her in physical acceptance of the challenge. Their descent was overly swift; wolves careening down the sheer face of their first trial together, as animals seeking to revert to their most basic elements. And only by the end of race would it determine if they deserved only to be bloodied and broken piles of flesh and bone, or if they were meant still to fight, and feed, and fornicate.

Warbone found a rhythm, leaping, charging, and skittering after her. The wind cared little for their balance, and the rocks even less as the terrain varied in its attempts to throw either of them off balance and to an uncertain doom. But the wolf felt nothing but exhilaration— an unadulterated joy that came from living in his most natural state— finally able to forget completely the emotion of loss and politics. He knew only that he wanted to catch the lurid sylph ahead of him, and he would die in his pursuit of her, if only he could extend the feeling a bit longer...