Ankyra Sound [m] burn it down

The scowl leveled at Ephraim was enough to wither his soul. He had been through a lot in his life, but there was only one other time someone had looked at him with so much disgust. It had taken years for his memories of war to stitch themselves into something more truthful than the nightmare he had experienced in the moment. More than anything, that expression stood out. These eyes were the same poisonous yellow that he saw in his dreams, but any further resemblance passed beneath his notice, his memories of his long lost family mere scraps of color held close to his heart.

That a stranger would look at him that way in the place of his ancestry raised indignant bile in his gut. It mixed with some deeply rooted emotion evinced by the wind flaring around Sobeille, turning his grief and uncertainty to a hot flash of anger and something more. With two lashes of his dark tail, Ephraim rallied, lips peeling back from gums and yellowed teeth as sea water sucked wet sand past his toes. In the dark of night, Sobeille's presence made her seem larger and fiercer than any opponent he had faced.

Fight me, or die.

It was not Ephraim's lot to be a combatant. That maternal trait had skipped him entirely. Nevertheless, he stalked dangerously forward, dropping his head so his skull was level with his rolling shoulders. He thought about running. He had spent his whole life running. It was a skill all its own. But those xanthous eyes that glared at him and measured him, those kiln-lit eyes that lingered in the back of his mind, that black presence that warded others away from him, none of these would allow it this time.

When the distance between them was short enough that he could make out a gap where a tooth should have been, Ephraim slowed for but a moment. His prowling paw trailed idly over the wet sand. Without warning, it dipped down, digging into earth, and a clump of wet sand sailed toward Sobeille's face. A split second later, the coywolf rushed her with gaping jaws.

Ephraim would not die.

So he must fight.