Northstar Vale girl, with an accent of blood

“I challenged Stigmata not for his post, but to make it known that I would not lie idle while ze wolves of that lake lorded over my children and I. I am a fool, it is true, but not so much to ever think my ascension wouldn’t give cause to rebellion. Diaspora was never ze breed of pack in which I would preside.”  Her tone took on a marked edge of its own; her eyes gone hard and bright as quartz as she studied the acclaimed commander without remorse. “Moon and moon, ze thought of founding my own is ... undeniably tempting. I am indebted to those who now shelter my children and I, but,”  truthfully?  “as much as I long to, there are none who follow me.”

“I, myself, have a creed — but with all that has happened, it is more and more becoming a mere figment, however ... when the time comes, I will make it come to fruition. But not yet. Not yet.”  Not when her son healed. Not when her daughter burned through her lessons. Not when their father scarce ever spoke to her. Not when, in her greying mind, she hadn’t the slightest inkling of how to approach all three.

She wasn’t sure who would follow her, should the phenomena ever happen.

But Aurëwen rose, anyways, gaze inscrutable, glinting.  “You are right. How I left, for all of my beliefs, was ridiculous, and there might have been another manner in which to depart ... but, I did not. I allowed my resentment to sit, and sit, and sit, and when I understood no longer and could not make others understand, I struck. For all of my ridiculousness, though, I would do ze same thing if it meant dwelling beneath one whose ideals did not suit my own.”  She regretted many things, this past season and the last — but it didn’t mean she wouldn’t have ended up where her children and herself were, now.  Given ze chance, would I have amended my mistep?

More weary than she could shoulder, the herbalist reclined upon her haunches, and resumed a ponderous look upon her ... whatever Praimfaya was through her relations with the wanlinda’s uncle. To figure out ancestry was more than her mind could stand, at the moment, and Aure did away with the sobering thought in favor of:  “What would you have done, in my place? Left, once, by mine brother; twice, by ze father of my children, promises of return or no. Feeling that none were suited for a replacement that, I’m assuming, my children might not have appreciated?”  If this budding commander truly was what she claimed, then she saw no reason to withhold her cascading thoughts.  “Feeling as if, regardless of my post as pionier, I had not earned ze respect of ze nomads? After all, we had simply arrived out of necessity to birth children.”

And that was all Aurëwen would ever see the lake-home as: yes, the place where her children were born, but there were no sentiments beyond the desperation out of the fear of laboring in the true wilds. For all its security, her time in Arrow Lake had been a place of isolation, loneliness, and anguish. Her marred brow furrows, scars writhing — at the end of the day, she’d wanted to show the wolves of Diaspora that she hadn’t become so pathetic, pining, or mindless.

But, myriad that she is, it’s safe to say that Aurëwen simply liked to think she did was what right: selfishly, considerately, and neither.