Neverwinter Forest join: i use my hair to express myself

Once upon a time, long before Poet's time, there had been two wolves at odds: Bronx DeMonte, her long-dead grandfather, and Sphinx Endore, the equally long-dead founder of Winterheart Forest. It would once have seemed preposterous for the granddaughter of Bronx to meet with and pledge herself to the granddaughter of Sphinx... But whatever the conflict had been, it was lost to time now, and there was something sweetly ironic hidden there about Poet's decision to investigate Neverwinter Forest further. So, with little to no knowledge of her family's former ties to the Alpha of the land, Poet stood several hundred yards from Neverwinter's border, where the smell of fellow wolves was strong.

She had yet to do much coming into herself. She was three, but at times still felt like she was one, safely in the comfort of her home amongst her siblings, new and old. The doubts that plagued her on the road as she shied away from pack after pack had not been present in Lilac Valley — not the original Lilac Valley, but the secondary one, found by her parents following the Nova Mountain eruption, if what she'd been told growing up was to be believed — but they were here now, gnawing at her stomach as she hesitantly shifted her weight back and forth.

She was stalling, but it was in her best interest. Poet was a good weather-watcher, but she certainly wasn't no wonder-wolf for hunting. She could provide for herself, but not indefinitely, not with prey becoming scarce as the nights grew colder. Yet every time she went to howl for an audience, the muscles in her gut knotted so tightly she felt she could scarcely breathe. It took almost thirty minutes before she managed to get a short, clipped howl out, and even then the aftermath of it made her plump jowls quiver with anxiety.

Poet III was a strong wolf, at least in spirit, with an unquenchable loyalty and a level-headed view of things... But not when she thought of Berlioz, and how he had allegedly died in defence of his pack, wolves she still naively believed had done nothing for him to save him from his fate. Not when she was preparing herself to place her fate in the hands of non-family, of somebody that had no reason to care whether she lived or died. In this situation, she was a coward, but she steeled herself; the worst that could happen was that she declined with faux politeness and fled once again.