Heron Lake Plateau Tyrants and kings both meet the same fate, strung up at your city gate

Quick, I shall type before I forget I wanted to use that song lyric as a thread title! >_>

Since the promotion he'd probably spent more time avoiding people while he tried to process what had happened than he did doing actual alpha duties -- he walked the borders at odd hours, took naps far from the lake's edge, though he did go on his jaunt to what should have been Tindome -- but now he was kind of out of excuses.  Too bad Quixote wasn't exactly done figuring out what to do, despite past encouragement that he'd do fine.  He was, needless to say, conflicted and to a point uneasy with himself just as he would any new leader.  If leadership corrupted, would he be next, or would his awareness break him of this fate?  Would he be able to see if it went wrong?  Why the hell had this all happened at once?

The light was dimming, the last rays of the sun cutting in through the clouds that had brought rain earlier in the day, leaving stretched, blobby shadows across the plateau.  Quixote was mentally weary, but that was more from his own internal arguments than anything.  He wasn't focusing on much besides putting one foot in front of the other in the vague direction of the territory borders as he suffered through the remaining whiplash from the past few weeks -- hell, why not make it a full month?  Blackfeather, moving, Raven, alphaship.  It sounded like a really bad story that never would have a chance in hell of happening to some dude that never had a drop of luck in his life -- maybe the third act of a story, but he didn't feel like it had concluded in the sense of victory and accomplishment that was supposed to come along with such tales.  In fact, if anything Quixote felt like thinking about it all was tying his guts in a knot, and that showed in the fact his walk was not one utterly stoked to suddenly have privilege and power, but more like a guy who'd turned inward to hide himself even more from the world.  When was the other shoe gonna drop?