Verdant Basin Partners In Crime

The King turned to look back at who'd followed him, but it was then the wind whipped forward a heartbreakingly familiar scent, and the Pryor's attention was at once on it. 
Prancing forward on his tiptoes, Alder's neck craned to look as far as he could for the owner of said scent with a stiff chuff to his eldest daughter to stay close. A lot of things could come from a scent he knew: enemies, family, old conners, previous-packmates, ex-girlfriends.... There was one at the front of his hopes, of course: Emory. The King would bow before Raas and pray for his twin back if he thought something would change that she was gone. 
The worst part was not knowing where she was, or why she'd gone. Locusts had just wiped out the Wilds -- he remembered fighting the storm to find her agouti pelt, snapping at the bugs to land on her and leading her to Reek's cave for safety -- and she just vanishes? What could she have been thinking? Why didn't she come home to him? She would have been given the title of his Duchess, without doubt. He wanted her beside his side, always. 
He still did. 

He didn't have to go many paces down the water before the slim, clearly feminine frame of another broke the horizon, and Alder was struck still in disbelief, suddenly too wanting to wonder if it could be his twin sister's frame. Too many females I could know. It's not her. Can't be her. 

But she got closer. 

                                                       And closer.  
 
                                                                                                              And closer. 

                                                                                                                                                              "Emory?"


Alder's hackles were raised in sudden fear, nails digging into the earth as he stiffened. His ebony mask fell from stoic and king-like to purely heartbroken, his singular carribean eye staring at her like she was a corpse walking. 

               
            
                                           "EMORY?!"

Her name coming out in an excited roar, the cream and ginger mass that was Alder Pryor galloped forward, howling in joy as he bulleted forward without a doubt in the world. 

He didn't once think that the changes he'd undergone would be a surprise for her: he might've been scarred before, but he sported many new noticeable ones that weren't the halved ear and the missing eye, not to mention the smell of a new home, children and another woman all over his coat -- he didn't even remember that she wouldn't remember his new name.