Qeya River i'm fixing a hole

if anything needs changed/anything seems to power-played in this post just give me a nudge and i'll gladly edit it! :-)

there was never a moment that vilkas thought he shouldn't be following lily's scent trail when he came across it leaving the sanctuary's borders. she's free to come and go as she pleases, of course, and he waits ( going about his business ) but she does not return and his concern for her blossoms in his chest like blood blossoms on a shirt after a gun shot. he cannot staunch the worry that creeps into his stomach where it pools like ice and whispers dark, nagging and undecipherable nothings in his mind. he trusts his instincts more than he trusts anything else and everything within him tells him to go after her. he listens. he steps over the unnecessary borders of the sanctuary and keeps his back to the pack as he follows after lily's staling scent trail.

as he nears the qeya river it grows fresher and the firebrand quickens his pace in response. he's too far away but he hears the sickening snap of bone with a quick cup of his ears, alert. by the time he reaches the bank of the river where lily's scent is the freshest she is gone and his heart lurches into his throat as he feverishly looks right and then left to see her head bobbing above the current. "lily!" he snarls out her name and scowls at the rapid current of the water as it carries her quicker away and threatens to pull her head under it's surface. he's never been a strong swimmer and before he can launch himself into the water there is another splash — the distinct sound of a body slamming into the water and he looks left with a feral growl to see that someone else has jumped in after her, downriver.

fire dipped hackles bristle and he takes to the bank with ferocious vigor, heading up river, searching furiously for a place to cross without getting swept up in the torrential waters as well. he finds it, eventually: a thinning of the two opposite banks and a trunk that looks ...rather unstable. he crosses it, teetering with a low curse as it rocks against the rush of water and the two boulders jutting out of the river that it balances precariously on. he is running out of time, he knows. by now, lily and the stranger could be drowned. he runs across it and takes the leap, skidding against the earth, rolling to cushion his collision. there is a sting of burn from where the landing had rubbed his left, hind leg raw but he uses the pain to fuel him forward as he runs down river, searching furiously for the two bobbing heads: shadow kissed and pale.

he finds them, lily's fur gripped in the stranger's grasp as the other appears to be attempting to swim diagonal in the current towards the bank where vilkas waits like burning flame twitching with anxiety: at trusting a stranger, at lily's condition, at if the current would best the wolf that is attempting to swim her to the shore. anxiety that he cares enough to know that if a stranger wouldn't have he would have made the leap without a second thought after lily despite that he wasn't a strong swimmer. he doesn't examine that too closely as he fidgets on the bank, beguiling the pair to come nearer. "get her close enough and i'll help you onto the bank!" vilkas raises his voice to the stranger over the roar of the water, hoping that the stranger hears as he prepares to grasp lily's scruff when they are close enough and pull the pair onto the safety of the shore, hoping that his plan will work and the stranger will implore the same trust to him that he has no choice but to give them.