The Sentinels the salty seas behind the eyes

Akantha struck north towards the ashes of what was once a majestic, towering woodland teeming with life and protected by the ancient trees. They stood now, burnt up, hollow; a remnant of a greater age. The weather was warming now—the snow had ceased to fall, and the fathomless cloud cover was beginning to take form again. She saw them through, as She always did, but there was an unmistakable emptiness to their ranks now. They were missing a few from their convoy, and Akantha was determined to find what remained of them. 

She didn't harbor the hope that the missing few survived out here alone, but she owed it to Her to find their wayward children and bring closure to the Sirens so that they could move on. Curiously, Astraios was one of the missing. The ashen speck usually stayed close to Meteora, but had turned up absent on the night of the ice storm. Akantha couldn't say she missed him terribly, but his absence was tantamount to losing potential diversity in their breeding stock. If he was gone, it left only Whip as their progenitor, and he was too young to contribute until the next season.

Akantha frowned as she passed the charred corpse of an unfortunate deer caught in the blaze. Only it's ghastly grinning skull peeked out of the snow, the rest buried by the blizzard. She bristled and made to move past, until a tuft of fur beside the visage caught her attention. She turned and reached out to scrape the snow away, revealing more until a wolfish neck was exposed. Her blood ran cold, but she continued undaunted until she revealed the truth—@Astraios' face, frozen with the deer haunch still clutched between his teeth, lie there with his lips turned up in a foul grimace. 

The snow beneath him was brown with old blood, and she wondered just what had transpired to lead him to this unfortunate fate. Her ears slicked back and she felt the first, and only, pangs of loss. Despite his gender, he had been one of them, and he'd died away from the Sea. Akantha looked back the direction she came, then back to the corpse with a frown. "I'm sorry, Consort." She murmured as she reached down to place a gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth.