The Heartwood of ash and silence

It had been too since Cry had seen his Uncle. So long, in fact, that the Assassin began to assume the bear of a wolf, dead. He hadn’t wanted to jump to conclusions, but it had been atleast a year, if not more. He hadn’t seen the Sire of Nightmares anywhere, nor the band of stragglers that had come with them. He hadn’t even seen Leila, and Cry tried his damndest to keep out the possibility that the gentle hearted girl too had perished. But pessimism ran in his blood, and until proven innocent, all were guilty in the Phantom’s mind.

Continuing his journey through the forest, he halfheartedly searches for clues while rethinking his past. A hurtful past, one filled with loss and restraint. One filled with smiling faces and soon, ghosts. Absence...he knew it. Forsakenment...he knew it, too. Forlorn...all of them were present in his numb mind. But there wasn’t anything the hitman could do about them. Just as there was nothing he could do about those who he knew only for them to disappear as easily as they had come in his life. 

Adjacent from him, his glazed over glacials skimmed across a blur of darkness, and with it, an alignment of wolf scent. Instantaneously his focus returned, aids targeting this living being and irises froze upon whoever this might be. Momentarily his athletic body had frozen, and he had become one with the stillness of a murdered forest.

For a second, a slight second, he thought this was Slade. Huge in structure and motionlessly, Cry tried to catch the brute’s eyes. Should this be his Uncle, there would be hell to pay.