Stone Circle defeat the stymphalian birds

In the middle of nowhere a low sun bent to strange ways from a twist of branch. When he names this place she draws the blinds over anxious thoughts and thrumming blood. Hush says the mind and she turns her focus to the oracle.

Dangling from his teeth is a heavy hide. She’s upheld by his fluorescent sight. The bundle is dropped; the objects scatter across the shallow earth.

It’s with great tenderness he engages his collection- the strange, dark keepsakes. There are some bones wholly unfamiliar, like one massive saw-tooth she could not conjure the master of. One disturbingly familiar, shedding light on the animal who once bore it. A wolf. She felt sick, but kept her silence as he spun his vision.

It was a reading of fear- great fears birthed first by a mind and now given winds in the spoken word and threatening to take flight. How dare he impose this upon her! What even designated it so? The angle of a rib? The tilt of a tooth? The sound which clacked all the sum of its parts?

“This is who I am,” She implores, “or shades of what’s to come? An apathetic… powerhungry, rank-climber?” Her resistance sheds to a shake of head, she pitches with a step away from him.

Apathy- for her unborn children? Cubs she wouldn’t bond with? For her pack? Or Taktuq, or Gunnar, whose vision of goodwill she could never fully shape to?

Willpower- a resistance to change? A toxic tenacity, to rise beyond Kvarsheim’s ranks?

Dominant- in a forceful way? In an unfair way, a self-possessed corruption?

Her nose coils, he’s misinterpreted.

“Read them again.” She insists upon it, a waver of desperation in her voice. He’s wrong- he has to be.