The Sentinels where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night

@Hemlock, want to fade our part of the thread with your post? You can just assume that Lotte told Hemlock everything that happened to her in the Teekons so far. ♥ Then we can wait for Olive and @Dakarai to weigh in. I know Rachel said she’s good to archive whenever so I’ll wait to hear from Chey if she’s okay with it.

At mention of the memorial stones, Lotte turned her head toward the territory they’d left behind. “We cannot go back for them. We will have to raise new ones,” she murmured apologetically, her argent eyes somber. “We are already taking a grave chance by moving this way — it would have been better to send wolves in pairs or singly and stagger the dispersal. We will leave a thicker scent trail this way, one that will linger for at least half a moon — more if it rains, and it will, with the spring thaw.” The soot-stockinged rogue knew a thing or two about tracking, and the whole situation was far from ideal. She kept her voice pitched low, though, not wanting to worry the pack.

“I am sorry, Hemlock,” Lotte intoned softly. “For your losses.” She turned back to the fire-kissed wolf, speaking not only of Furiosa and Palisander but of their memorial — and, of course, the forest itself.

As the pack’s alpha female, Lotte felt that the responsibility fell to her and to Arturo to beg forgiveness for such crimes — and maybe that wasn’t really the case, but she sighed regretfully nonetheless before forcibly setting her dark mood aside in an attempt to bolster Hemlock’s spirit. She didn’t recognize the healer’s plan for what it was — a desire to slow down the thickly-furred firecracker — and because she didn’t, she complied as she was meant to. The Kali woman was wily, to say the least. “For me, it all started here…” she began, pausing at the border where she had first followed her brother and singing a few bars of the silly song she’d wrote for him:

“Rakeet, o keepers of the wood
where many wolves in judgment stood!
In judgment mayhaps too shall stand
this smoking Ansbjørn firebrand,
for in your ranks, a chocolate bear —
rotund of torso, thick of hair —
has found his place and made his home,
no longer these wilds to roam.”