Ankyra Sound and it's as if my eyes have been replaced with gasoline.

Ephraim couldn't say why he returned to the coast except that he was guided there by some fraying thread of sentiment, or maybe a hint of insanity. He knew full well that the wolves of his family would kill him on sight before he could explain a single thing. Ditto Drageda. So why did he saunter along the drowned, shattered sands, tempting fate? Perhaps it was to prove to himself that he had outgrown them and outrun his ghosts.

But ghosts had a pesky way of finding their prey again and again and again, and it was a ghost that he came to behold at Ankyra Sound. So shocking was her appearance that Ephraim didn't even notice the lack of scent markers, the absence of the resident pack; his eyes were only for Caiaphas. He thought if he ever saw his mother again, she would attack him. She had, Heda once told him, turned her back on him when he had not recognized her and had fought beside his pack, like any loyal soldier, and so Ephraim expected that she would tear his soul from his flesh if given the chance. And he thought he would hate her for it.

What he felt instead for the haggard skeleton of a creature dragging its non-functioning rear end toward the grotto was fear. Fear and pity and sadness and a little boy's loneliness. After the battle between Drageda and Rusalka, when he came to know who their enemies really were, he had seared the image of her into his mind so he would never forget the look of her again, so even with her eyes filmed in sickly silver and her body failing her, Ephraim knew. His jaws parted to croak a hoarse, ...mom?