Moonspear you are to me like a very, very wild thing

This was true; the food should return. There had been a famine around the same time as their own birth, and she and her sisters had not been touched by it. Or perhaps they had; perhaps their teeth and hearts had been carved by it, and that was why they were thrice as bloodthirsty as their parents, who were — who had been — formidable in their own right.

"Perhaps the strong do not die before their time," she said quietly, not quite sure about the sentiment. She thought of Ran and then of Galaxy and wondered — but there was no easy answer to that question. She thought of how easily she could have been felled by the mountain lion in her own youth, but how Dash had been taken instead. "I would die if it meant our children would live," she decided after a moment, and it was clear by her tone that this statement was meant to trump the supposition she'd voiced a moment before.

Alya flashed her teeth at Hydra. "But we have already seen that the three of us are difficult to kill." And that was that; pups would come just as easily as famines did. They would survive it, or they would not.

"But enough of that — what else has been happening? Who is this omega? And the wolf from the weald."