Chimera Fields gold heart; silver tears

Left to his own devices, the young wolf tried to make good use of his time — he patrolled the borders relentlessly, noting the arrival of three new scents with a mixture of pride, excitement, and trepidation. Quite by accident, he had caught his first warm-blooded kill, and to celebrate Eshe’s inevitably triumphant return with Scimitar at her side, Cypress had arranged a pile of autumn leaves near the family den — selecting only the most perfectly formed, brightly colored ones — and laid the small carcass upon it with meticulous care. Worry for Rannoch and Scimitar had made of his bright, strong mother a thinly-stretched, worried creature and Cypress doted upon her as much as she doted upon him. In truth, Eshe was the reason he had mostly ceased his obsessive searching for Lucy — she worried so when he left the territory! — but he firmly believed that her going out to search was the game changer. If anybody could find Scimitar, Rannoch, and Lucy, Eshe could. She still possessed the remarkable ability to right everything in the fledgling’s world, and he greeted the arrival of Allure and Shrike with hope instead of despair.

The Frostfur boy’s assessment of Shrike was still developing; he understood that the grayscale wolf with striking ink-lined eyes was important to Allure, and that was enough to earn Cypress’ respect. That being said, the Neverwinter prince had not gone out of his way to establish a closer relationship with the former Caldera wolf, mainly on the grounds that all of his time nowadays was spent with his mother. He had grown selfish of her company, choosing not to venture far from her side — aside from Allure, she was the sole member of his immediate family who had not left him behind. Left unattended, he fretted — so when Allure suggested that they search the neighboring territories, Cypress jumped at the chance, insisting on carrying his kill with him lest one of his cousins attempt to steal it in his absence. With the cooling carcass clasped possessively between his jaws, he ran ahead — and when he caught his mother’s scent trail, he erupted into a boisterous howl of triumph and put on more speed. “Mama! Paw!” he cried, his voice breaking in his adolescence, the consonants muffled slightly by the prize he bore.

Cresting a rise as a brisk autumn breeze danced westward, Cypress was assaulted by a thick miasma of scent that was an acrid, fetid mixture of decaying meat, urine, bile, feces, and blood. The metallic, cloying aroma caused his lantern-yellow eyes to swim with tears as his muzzle pooled with saliva — sick, the thought sputtered feebly across his sentience, I’m sick. He swayed upon his feet, desperately searching for the scent of his mother, which had been drowned out beneath the unfamiliar stench of two things he had never smelled before: bears and death. When his vision cleared, he made out two familiar shapes — and his paws were moving before he fully recognized what he was moving toward. “Mama! Paw!” he cried as he ran, the joy gone from him. He was badly frightened now and a sense of urgency he didn’t fully understand had swallowed him up completely; his skin prickled, every hair on his body standing at attention. His tail spiked out in a bottlebrush fashion as the wild hair along his nape and shoulders stood out like an array of quills; he licked his lips nervously as his eyes, jack-o’-lantern wide, settled on the fallen lovers. He panted, body trembling, as he nudged his mother’s shoulder. “Mama,” he said, watching in horror as fresh blood spilled from her nose, mouth, and even her ears.

His breathing was reduced to shreds as he regarded his paws, chilled and sticky with congealed blood, and he looked wildly about — perhaps Allure and Shrike had already drawn near, and perhaps they were saying things, but the world around him was blurred as if by some immortal stain. Had Eshe always been so small — so fragile? Even the form of Scimitar did not seem as heavily-muscled or proud as he had been in life, and it was to his father that Cypress went now on legs that buckled — he crashed to the earth beside his father, heedless of the blood that seemed to have swallowed up the field entirely, and nudged at the patriarch’s neck with an insistence he never would have dared invoke before. “P-P-Paw,” he squeaked out, heedless of the way his sides fluttered and his body shook, jarring the loving term of endearment from him in a series of skipping stutters. When he found his father’s body to be as cold and unyielding as the prey animal he’d clasped in his jaws only moments ago, Cypress skittered backwards, his jaw cracking open in terrified dismay — but he was immediately at his father’s side again, knowing that Scimitar alone could wake up Eshe, just as Eshe alone had been able to find Scimitar. Again and again he butted against his father’s prone form with his muzzle and crown.

“Paw, Mama — Mama’s hurt, you — you have to fix it,” he begged. “Fix it! Paw!” His pleas became commands, and the commands became epithets of their own making as his words ran together in one horrified scream that died into a whisper: “you’re not sleeping! You’re NOT sleeping, now get up, get up your eyes are open you’re not sleeping YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING YOUR EYES ARE OPEN PAW FIX IT FIX IT NOW!”