Silver Moraine chase

His words were heard, and Tikigâk nodded. She understood. He was Faust—Faust was Kaan. To him, it was more important than anything else—and Tikigâk could understand that. Kaan was not past, Darukaal was not past. It was present. It was now. 

Faust, Kaan—that is you. That is not wrong. Darukaal is not wrong, she rumbled. Tikigâk would not insult the man who piqued her interest, who listened—who was honest, even to himself. But she sensed he fought a battle that had nothing to do with the present that kept him so adamant, something else that had been formative. 

He had made Darukaal perhaps as Siku had once made Tartok. Perhaps, like Tartok, it too would endure. 

This other thing, though, this other weight—she thought he must kill it. Take it in his teeth and shake it until it grew limp and took on deaths eternal stillness. 

He would fight, always. She believed him. It was perhaps why she was drawn to him; she could see this strength in him. No leave them. No abandon—that is not our way, she would not ask that of him. The choice to become, she offered it to him and to his Darukaal—that they all might become one-blood in this way. 

Tikigâk would not push—what was unspoken was unheard, and not known to her. What she wanted him to know was that she would not ask for him to turn his back to those that were his that became. He was a strong leader—that had not once occurred to her to ask, nor think of him. 

But there was more than just him—and she suspected if one of his wolves determined not to become, it would be the them that he stood with. And why should he not? But that was why one’s faith in one’s own choice was imperative: they must be resolute.

And he was—in a different way, for a different purpose. In a way that appealed even still. There was spine and spirit in this one. The enemy that pursued him would lose in the end, she suspected.