Hushed Willows I was angry with my friend

With a mother who feared and avoided his distaste for her, and pack mates who were otherwise too preoccupied with their own work and frisky winter travels to notice him go, it was not very hard for the child-wanderer, Kavos, to quickly and very suddenly disappear.

He was not led astray like his sister, and nor was he content to nobly behaving like his brother, so he wound up entirely on his own, having escaped The Crook between snowfalls in a coincidental bout of fortunate timing. The snow was difficult for him to move through, but the boy was dauntless in his progress; carrying with him the savage, survivalist spirit of his absentee father, and something more sinister even than that— something he had not inherited, but had been plagued with, by his mother's tortured and anxiety-ridden pregnancy. Her self-loathing had done her son harm even before he'd been born, and his calloused attitude was not solely due to a stunted emotional capacity for joy.

There was something wrong with young Kavos.

He kept close to the mountainside, feeling somewhat protected by the sheer rock wall, knowing (yet not knowing) that he could only be accosted from one side. Surely a primitive and underdeveloped instinct. It wasn't long before it began to snow again, and he pulled his tired body into a rocky shelf and curled up to sleep there.

An equal amount of fortune and misfortune befell him that night. He became snowed in the small alcove, trapped by a mound too large for him to shovel through himself, but he was also sheltered this way; shielded from much of the cold that could have easily taken his life. He mostly slept, and having no concept of time, he didn't know how long he was in there, but it was forever to him; and when he dared to be awake, he mostly thought of Tambourine: his only true bond within the Keep. Kavos wished and wished and wished that it would be him to rescue him— not that he wouldn't have been grateful for anyone to show up by this point..

He was aware of a uneasy sensation inside him, but could not perceive the stimuli that was most certainly pain; the severe pains of hunger and cold. His stomach was eating itself as surely parasites, but he didn't feel any of it. He only grew weaker and weaker by the hour, right up until his body simply began to react on its own to the inner distress by forcing him to whine. Like Pavlov's dog, he had been conditioned to know that sounds, distressed or otherwise, typically garnished him some attention... And he needed it now.

It had been three days.