Redhawk Caldera towers

The physician followed willingly, though he was still a little on-edge. Leto hadn't given the best impression of this pack, but then again, Aureli did not have the best impression of her. Perhaps there was something to that.

"Aureli," he spoke his name in turn, simply and succinctly. At the woman's declaration, he shifted a pointed glance back toward the male, who had insisted they had a healer among them. Though his own title was physician, he used it interchangeably with words like healer and medic and medicine man, generally sticking with whatever title made his patients most comfortable. The healing arts were many, varied, and widely practiced — he would correct misinformation, but he well knew that there were other right ways to go about things. That there were practices that he did not yet know, but that he would do well to employ.

He had hoped he might learn more from Alivia, but he was becoming more and more skeptical.

Then again — the name of Vitale did recapture his interest. He recognized it easily enough, but hearing it aloud again? It brought Aureli back to the earliest days of his apprenticeship. One of the first stops he and Ulysses had made had been at a pack with a practitioner of that particular branch. Perhaps a wolf who had studied under them, or perhaps just an admirer of that school of thought. Aureli hadn't know enough to pay attention.

He had been so terribly young.

It was only revisiting the memories now that he found something suspect in the stop. They'd stayed a week, though none had been ill within the pack. Ulysses had spent quiet time with the healer, and with the fresh, blue-eyed babes that his younger self — Rémi, as he'd been known back then — had found so annoying.

It struck Aureli only now that they'd been his master's children.

He blinked and he was back in the present, silent a beat too long after a question had been asked of him.

"His name was Ulysses," he replied, his voice heavy. But his voice was always heavy. "He died three summers back."

It felt like longer ago. It felt like yesterday.

"I do not know much of the Vitale teachings," he informed her, bluntly side-stepping further conversation about his master. "Why do you not call yourself a healer?"

He tried to make this sound like a polite question rather than a demand. They were deep within her territory, after all — but perhaps he only partially succeeded.