Duskfire Glacier may you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows you're dead

Veteran leaned lightly into Wayfarer when he felt her flank brush against his own. He glanced quickly to her face when Lane mentioned them in her eulogy, but Wayfarer was looking determinedly away from their mother, as if she refused to hear anything Lane had to say. Veteran's heart ached to know that the two women he loved most had such a strained relationship, but he struggled to know how to intervene. Lane had mended the behavior that had offended Wayfarer: she had exchanging her scouting and ranging job for position of leadership in the pack, and she hadn't left home since. However, this olive branch seemed to be too little too late to be of any comfort Wayfarer, who refused to see Lane as anything other than an absent mother who had let her down irreparably. 

Veteran thought that losing one parent would inspire Wayfarer to mend the relationship with the one she had, but it had apparently only driven his sister further away. Lately, even Veteran himself struggled to connect with the embittered, foul-mouthed rogue his sister was becoming. He was taking after his mentor Issorartuyok, developing into a proud and responsible pack-wolf with respectful and formal speech, and Wayfarer... well, she clearly had other influences, although she had so far refused to speak meaningfully of any of her experiences outside of Duskfire Glacier.  

It was time for the rest of the attendants to speak, and so Veteran dutifully piped up. "Tzila was a second Mom to me. When I needed her, she treated me just like her own." Veteran's eyes got a little misty as he recalled the hazy memory of snuggling up to Tzila in a pile with the rest of his half-siblings. He realized with a start that Wayfarer would hear these words very differently, because she had experienced these events very differently. She would not think fondly of the days she'd spent tumbling around as part of Tzila's brood; she would remember that time as a long period of confusion, chaos, and abandonment. While Veteran had hardly noticed the absence of his mother, treating her trips out of the territory as opportunities to connect with his other packmates, Wayfarer had remained stubbornly lonely and brooding. 

"And Dad.. he made me a better man." Veteran looked around at his packmates, keenly aware that his eyes would remind them of the departed Wintersbane. He had his father's icy-blue eyes, he had been told. "Every time I spoke with him, I came away with new knowledge. He taught me how to think outside myself. I.. miss him." He fell quiet, refusing to speak further and risk getting choked up in front of the whole pack. He swallowed heavily, trying to force down the burning emotion that clawed its way up his throat and stung his eyes.