Raven's Watch nerve

she cherished the spreading silence, the thoughtfulness of it. here she did not need to try so hard to seem impressive or sound put together. here she could breathe and feel the weight of his presence without needing to voice it.

if they could spend many moments like this, it would work.

asha might even like it.

a new name was not a whole new wolf, was it? or maybe it would be if she spent many waking hours beneath his piercing gaze and his unknown ways. she might be like a stone and him a rushing river, keen to shape her in different ways.

but like a stone, she had been here long before anyone had sought to change her.

asha.

she echoed at last with one solid thump of her tail against cold earth. bloodstained from his kill made this feel like rebirth. it was so very different from the name she had slung upon her shoulders from her first birth.

asha.

this time with more grip upon it, claiming it and taking it for herself.