Moonspear he put me on the shoe, just to see what it'd do to me

backdated to a week after revui leaves. just squeezing it into my timeline.  

revui had gone before, but never for this long. arcturus knew his brother to be an adventuresome sort, but even then, it had been a week since his brother's scent had been freshly laid across moonspear.

arcturus fretted.

a few times earlier in the week, he had curiously trailed his brother's path -- never venturing much further than moonspear's perimeter. the distance that had passed between them grew ever wide, and eventually arcturus felt scorned by revui's departure, and bitterly turned away from searching for him.

but then came the guilt that he had not looked for his brother sooner, as now it was clear he was quite gone -- if something had gotten him, like it had gotten yami, then arcturus had failed not once as a brother, but twice.

so he fretted some more.

and then, eventually, he decided to do something about it. stormily, the dark yearling made his way down moonspear's tumbled landscape, going more by memory than by scent over the heavily-traced trail of revui's departure. it lead further and further away from moonspear, until at last the boy's home was hardly more than a distant set of jumbled stones on the horizon.

arcturus was gone for days.

he returned tired, sore, and hungry; he had not found revui, but had found failure instead. making his way back up moonspear's familiar spire, arcturus thought the road that went upwards was not the same road he had gone down -- somehow, separated from his brother, things were not the same.

he felt like yang without yin - a meaningless void without shape or definition; black without white to stark up its borders -- dark without light in which to give it depth and meaning. his brother had long been the complementary aspect to his existence -- without him there to polarize him, arcturus was simply a set of teeth with no direction or ambition.

a husk, without spirit.

assembling his tired body at the lip of the cave in which he had been born (the cave where he had rough-housed with revui as a teethling, pranked his parents with yami as a cub), arcturus crumpled in a heap and let loose a long, forlorn sigh as the chill of the mountain wind settled coldly around him.