Bearclaw Valley Ghosts of our past

I feel we could wrap this up soon? But I definitely need another with you, sister <3 Many many more haha!

Mate.

The implication of what Desna revealed took a moment to sink in, and when it did, Nanook reacted with a slight crook of her head. Yet the suble gesture hardly revealed the sickening weight she felt within.

She really had missed all her sister's life, and through this lingering thought, something of a lens peeled away. Desna seemed to sharpen and change. Not in some mystical way, like in the stories she had heard from travellers on the vast and open road. She didn't become something other than a wolf, but for the first real time Nanook didn't see the little girl she'd run from, back when she had been just a small one herself. Her sister stood before her as a stranger she didn't know, with a life Nanook hadn't shared.

Desna had found a mate - and had suffered the loss of it all, and in that moment, though her old self told her to flee, Nanook couldn't run. Not with the ache she felt from her sister, the weight of grief Nanook yearned to quell, though she didn't know a lick of how.

Yet at Desna's invitation, the silver wolf ducked her head, and hesitation played through the splay of her ears and the twitch of a grin at the corners of her mouth. "I don't know..." she trailed, and scuffed her paw in a physical attempt to shoulder the panic that flooded her mind. Could she really stop running? She wanted to think so, but the anxiety rose again - that maybe she was the cause of every inch of pain her family had suffered - and she began to turn away. She couldn't make Desna suffer again - she couldn't make Desna suffer more.

And then, she froze, though her thoughts bombarded her and pummelled her heart to a race. And this time, she said no. Nanook set her jaw, and forced herself to face Desna again. "No. I want to try." Her brow furrowed, her mind screamed, and the words she repeated sounded so little against the noise in her head, "Let me try."