Totoka River a snapshot in the family album

The lack of kill had driven him momentarily north, to where he knew the land met the sea. He had been once before, when the world was much simpler and he was respected. But now it was a desperate thirst that propelled him forth, like a lowly scavenger searching for any scrap of meat he could find. Nothing filled his days but the hunt, a parasite in his brain that thought of nothing but when next to kill. At the back of his mind, he knew it was compensation for something, to be someone again, to have something in his life besides a history that nobody else would want to have. Whatever it was, he knew it needed to be fed. So, when he picked up the trail of a wolf nearby he did not think but act, blindly gliding forward in ambition to kill.

That was halted abruptly, of course. He knew who she was as soon as he laid his eyes on her - no question about it. There was simply no way he could forget or misidentify his favoured sibling, even though time and circumstance had ripped them apart. But he didn’t bound towards her like he felt he should. Instead, Vaati watched her without a sound. He watched her as smiled and laughed, something so pure that had been sorely absent about the girl during their time in the dark woods. Even as a child, he couldn’t recall a time he had ever heard her chiming laughter ring about the forest. The thought made him frown, knowing that the reason she hadn’t ever done those things was a reason he could have saved her from. He had protected Maegi from birth, first from their mother’s fangs and then from her words. Yet, the latter had occurred anyhow right under his nose. He had been too preoccupied with his own moral dilemmas to save the girl from her’s, even when the sanctity of her childhood had been worth more than his. Perhaps, had he been as good of a brother as he was a murderer, he might have saved her from being swallowed by the dark woods and all the curses it had to offer. It was a fact that he regrettably could not change, for she was grown now, and had likely grown the skin she needed to survive a long time ago. Such a fate was cast upon nearly all the children to come out of Blackfeather Woods, for generations beyond Vaati was even aware of, and if he knew that, perhaps he would not have felt so guilty as he did at that moment.

The thought crossed his mind to simply leave, to crawl away back to his hollow life fulfilled only by bloodshed and the impending threat of a death sentence, saving his sister from bringing up a past he was sure she wanted to leave behind. Why else would she have been so far from the dark woods without the traces of the trademark stench of death, if she had no intention of returning any time soon? Perhaps he could do her what he could not to before, and save her from confronting someone who lived only in her past. And he almost did, had she not turned her head.

The laceration was deep, split all the way to the bone of her gum and dragged upwards, displaying every jagged tooth she had on the left side of her face from her incisors to her molars. His blood turned to liquid fire in his veins, overcome completely with a white-hot rage he had yet to feel since his return. It was a feeling he had not felt even as he killed, a passion that was unparalleled in any action he could commit himself. It was likely that he was stomping as he barrelled towards her, and it was also likely that he looked like he was going to kill her, but he stopped short before her breathing heavily through his nostrils. “Who did this to you?” It came as a demand, a bellow in fact, that he really couldn’t consider any way better to reunite with his long lost, little sister than this.