Nova Peak If you must leave, leave as though fire burns under your feet

But Mahler was wrong.

All she had to show for this was the missing eye. She’d felt the splinter of Umbra’s bone in her jaws, but that would heal. Bones grew back, or so Wylla thought. Eyes did not. Umbra would bide her time and return and wreak havoc again if she so chose with nothing lost, but Wylla would never regain what she’d lost to the cliffs, and she didn’t think she would find the mental fortitude to risk a repeat in the future.

Mahler’s voice was a roar in her ears as he withdrew, damning the cliff wolves and demanding she vacate the den in the same breath. Stubborn fire scorched her throat, threatened to blast him with a bellow that he should piss off and leave her alone. In the end, she swallowed it, along with the last vestiges of her pride. Only shame left to her now.

She slunk from the darkness with her head cast low and rolled her face toward him almost resentfully, granting him the access he sought. Let him see, then. Let him bask in her ugliness and denounce her in his heart of hearts, let him finally see the wolf she was within wrought plain as day in her flesh, and maybe then he would at last make a real decision about the future he wanted to have, or not have, with a broken wolf like her.