Emberflame Ridge just live your goddamn life

Lonesome Dove was a desert creature. Hard snow wasn’t ever her friend, nor would it ever be. She was a girl who didn’t understand the weather, but stuck close to Sadey when they headed out, ultraviolet eyes landing in worry on her coat.

But, when the winter snows would begin and the snows would whip and howl and scream, she would begin to fall behind, desperate to keep up but struggling, struggling, struggling. She wasn’t made for this.

Lunge, lunge, lunge through the snow, her gasps a melody for no one to hear. The coats of the only ones she had known since she had gotten here got further and further into the distance. Her heart thundered, her eyes watered. She wouldn’t!

She wouldn’t lose a family again, even if this one was bloody, was harsh and angry and bitter and fighting a war she had no fucking stake in, was turning her into a dark reflection of who she was. Corruption seeped from the tar black hearts of the cowboys, and into the pitch parts of the coywolf herself. The cannibal she never had been, the murderer she had no reason to become. All of it, she was becoming it. It tied her fate inextricably to the Gang.

But even she was helpless to the whims of nature’s coldest fingers.

All that was left of Lonesome Dove when the winds howled, was her distant, desperate, coyote-pitched scream, before there was nothing of the little coywolf to be found.