Greatwater Lake we are the reckless

Heph listened, intent, but warm as she contemplated Atka's words. "I think I do." And she thought she understood the missing something but knowing you couldn't go back and that particular aching for something. Like a hunger for something that did not exist, that was hard even to imagine.

She was a bit startled by the question, her own gaze turning misty though she continued to look over the other wolf and their surroundings. But the water felt cooling and Atka felt warm and there really was nothing to hide. Heph was not sure she had ever really put to words why she had left, she simply had. "Ahhh well it was really no one's fault." She was not sure where to start, her voice smooth over the retelling but distant as she began to pull her memories into the past. "We were all on a big hunt, moose, eventually we cornered this big bull." There was a faint smile on her face as she said that, remembering how proud they all were, the rush of a real challenge.

But her face twisted quickly into a frown. It had been enough time she could say it, but it felt weird to say it out loud. That her brother was dead. That whole chunks of her family had been taken when she had never had to explain before. "My brother and a few of my cousins were all killed taking it down, I got away with just a scar." There was a wry sort of smile and she shifted a bit to show the jagged line that ran down her shoulder. It felt so trivial. She had hardly been able to walk the first couple of months, but the rest of the pack had cared for her, and all the other injured wolves. It was a boon, but at the time the pain had felt like nothing, she could hardly focus on it as everything else just seemed like so much more. Her leg healed before her other wounds had and it was that healing that that allowed her to leave and begin the harder journey to be better.

She leaned back to a more comfortable position and added, her voice more distant, less laden with sadness. It was all like something rolling downhill, inevitable after so much death but still sad. "But after that the entire pack was just looking for anyone to blame, it felt like everyone hated everyone else, a lot of them left and I guess I did too." She shrugged her shoulders, unsure what to say after that. It was nothing special. Wolves died all the time, and packs dispersed less frequently but it happened. "It just didn't feel right to stay anymore you know?" Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if their pack had banded together, gotten stronger after losing their own, but that that not happened.

Bringing herself back to the present she could not quite manage a smile but it was all in the past. "Sorry, I didn't mean to be so maudlin." It felt strange to recall, because so many of her memories she could recall should have been happy, had been, but it was that moment and the moments and memories after.