Stone Circle push play, stop, rewind

He was close, but she was quicker. The wretch ran, and tore Leta away, and the flurry that followed blurred into a single moment of confusion and anger and fear at the enemy’s violent shake, and at the body of Leta, whipped and thrown aside like a plaything through the air.

His reaction came on instinct, and Merrit did what any other wolf would do when they came face to face with a projectile flung straight at their head: he lurched aside, yet remained dazed and transfixed upon his little sister as she sailed toward the ground her mouth fixed and silent, and her tiny body contorted entirely wrong.

And his eyes made contact with hers. They were so much like mother’s, but a cold dread ran the length of Merrit’s spine. He couldn’t see Leta anymore. In her place rose the flash of a long buried memory, when he had watched his sister Keen chew through the dark, dead eyes of the raccoon Mother had brought for them to eat, and the young man found himself filled with fear and tripping over his own paws, until he lost his footing and stumbled headlong into the grass.

The sky spun above him, and nausea swept through the contours of his jaw. Somewhere behind him his sister sank into the sun scorched earth, and somewhere beyond, the violent sounds of pursuit rang through his ears, too loud and everywhere. He had to get up, he had to try, and he did. But shock rendered him useless, and for all his efforts the world still reeled and he sunk to the ground again, and Merrit found he could do little more than shiver beneath the waves of shock as Leta’s face burned through his mind again and again, and as the taste of the enemy’s salty stench festered like poison through his mouth.