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

You can't fight them all.

Alya felt her heart riot against the confines of her chest. She loved Hydra so dearly; more than she had loved her parents, and yet their dual loss had torn her to pieces all the same. Each and every death and departure had been a blow, and now they were getting down to the nitty gritty. There were so few that Alya could part with without grevious harm to her own pysche, and now this — 

their enemies drew closer in the shadows, calling them their friends and yet tightening like a noose around their throat, grabbing like hungry, thorned brambles into their skin. Alya drew in a soft breath, wondering what, then, they should allow to rule them: their pride? their strength? Both things her sister commanded as easily as she commanded her wolves, but there would come a day when it could not save them. It had not saved their parents. It had not saved Dash.

"I just think — "

She swallowed the words, feeling unfit to speak them. She had failed this family so many times in her absence. If she had been here, perhaps she could have kept them from this even before it started.

"I just worry," she amended, wondering if she was, even now, failing her family. "The Nightwalkers... they do not love you. And fear is a weaker god than friendship." There. That was that said, even if it was not phrased quite as strongly as she felt it deserved.