The Bracken Woods tell them God just dropped by to forgive our sins

Feel free to find him, or he can run into them next round. ♥

“Alya?”

The dark wolf stirred, rusty murmur clinging thickly to his tongue as he rearranged his long limbs and looked blearily about. Thorns. Fucking thorns. Maybe Bramblepoint didn’t look exactly as Cypress remembered, but he didn’t question it. It’d been months, after all, and Alya didn’t break promises. She’d nursed him back to health and promised to take him to Rian and Noch — and the thorns, at least, were memorable. Where was Alya, anyway?

Somewhere along the way she’d come to be the one constant in his life. She’d pulled him from the river and tended his wounds; hunted for him and nursed him back to health with foul-tasting medications. Age had changed her. She didn’t talk to him much anymore, and she’d become irritated with the billion-and-counting times he asked her about leaves and Rian and Noch, but she was steady. Dependable. Most of the time, she liked to hear him talk — or anyway, she sure asked a lot of questions — usually about how they’d met, things he’d said, things she’d said, and…oddly, how far they’d gone. She didn’t like when he teased her about having a slippery memory, so he didn’t anymore — but it concerned him. Just a little.

It was the family stuff that bugged him. He was forgettable, or so he believed; and although it had rankled at first, he’d come to accept that Alya had enjoyed the attentions of other beaux. For her to ask him so baldly about his family history and to quiz him on what he knew of hers, though…well, it felt a lot like the games weren’t just games anymore. He didn’t understand the intensity that danced sometimes in her eyes, but she didn’t like it when he called her on it. So, he didn’t. Anyway, the medication made him too sleepy to protest.

Something about last night was bugging him, though. Did we fight? His mouth was dry and his stomach was gurgling audibly — it’d been something about her eyes, but not about the weird expression she got sometimes; it’d been about something else, something else —

“Alya?” he asked, entreating shadows and empty space. He threw back his head to call for her, his hollow baritenor rough around the edges with sleep. There was no reply.