Barrow Fields what do you see before you blink?

Though Caiaphas had seen fit to give her children adequate space to breathe and acclimate, Svalinn could not suffer the separation. He followed her; a boy suffering from "my mom's real son just came back" disease, and brimming with a dire, anxious need to feel validated. Raleska was distracted—recently reunited with her own littermate—and it was hard for him to watch them be close. Nearly as hard as it was for him to understand that the connection they shared could never belong to him. He considered her his only littermate, but her life, with her siblings, had started well before he'd been savagely injected into their lives.

He had always been other to them, and his closeness with Raleska had been forged out of sheer convenience and happenstance, rather than of any natural-born affection.

He was feeling this disconnect now; finding it impossible to feel as taken by the returned sibling as his mother and his sister, even though, privately, he wanted to be. Feeling excluded was the alternative, and he had never felt more isolated than he did now: on the lump-faced prairie, watching his mother sprint away after some unseen quarry.

Svalinn wasn't so entrenched in his own inner warfare to remain inert at the prospect of food. He darted to where he'd last seen her disappear betwixt ballooned mounds, and then hungrily began sniffing her out, greedily hoping there was a dead rabbit he could snag half of at the end of this trail.