Swiftcurrent Creek Those love songs break your heart.

Private for Bazi!

It had been almost a year since Paarthunax ran away from home, and she'd been a loner for half of her adult life. A year since she'd saw any of her once-beloved relatives, since she felt the warm sands of Samarkand beneath her paws. A year of running for fear that Sahrotaar would find her and punish her for fleeing, knowing how valuable she'd been to his alliance with their neighbour.

A year of her life, lonely and wasted.

She'd briefly joined a couple of packs on her travels, offering her medicinal knowledge in exchange for an opportunity at starting fresh, but she was unaware of what she wanted. Paar longed for the comfort and closeness of family, and she'd been raised as part of such an unusual hierarchy that she found it difficult to adjust to something new. But she had experience among "normal" wolves now and, confident that she could try again, had followed a scent trail to discover the borders of a new stationary pack.

Paarthurnax felt hesitant, as she did every other time she lingered at the outskirts of a potential new home, but she did not wish to appear weak in the presence of a leader. And so she did to linger to think about what may or may not go wrong, and tilted her muzzle toward the evening sky to announce her arrival and request an Alpha.