Wapun Meadow there's more to me then death / disaster

Cyron’s eyelids are heavy and he fights the urge to let slumber take him for as long as he possibly can. He has to keep going. If there is nothing else he knows it is this. His body demands rest. He wants to sleep. He was brave, at least, he thinks. Or, at the very least this is what Cyron tells himself: that he was brave for escaping; but that ‘bravery’ could easily be misconstrued. It could have just as easily been terror that had finally spurred him into action; regardless Cyron believes it was his bravery. He does not realize that it was his fear that gave him the chance to be brave; that the two are not absent one another. For once, Cyron was his own hero. He thinks that with a gentle stirring of warmth in his numb chest, a small spark of something where he previously felt nothing but the insistent drive to keep walking. To not stop.

The warmth spreads and Cyron stirs having drifted off into sleep without truly meaning to, blinking blurry eyed at the looming shape. Cyron does not recognize his father right away, whether it was from his time away though Mawk had not changed so much as Cyron had or disorientation from being awoken from his cat nap. There is a sudden influx of noise: ‘my baby! my baby!’. The words are high pitched and cause Cyron to flinch, startled as he is showered with kisses. His heart pounds rapidly in his chest and he takes a few deep breaths and shifts his weight in the snow, curled tail giving a soft half-hearted wag as realization begins to dawn on him. “Mama? Papa?” His voice is as raw and rough as he no doubt looks, having not been used during his time in Blackfeather Woods. His tongue feels like sandpaper in his mouth and the sound of his own voice causes him to recoil slightly. It too has changed. It has lost the softened and high-pitched cadences of early pup-hood.

“I wan — wanna go home.” He tells them, stuttering over his tongue, clumsy from months without vocal use, smacking his lips before he weakly scoops up a mouthful of snow in the hope that it might moisten his suddenly dry mouth.