Hideaway Strath One in the chamber, blood in the water, my love

It was the scent of wolves that reeled Ephraim in from the wilds, but when he clambered over their inconvenient rock pile and penetrated past their territory defences, he was met with a surprising lack of resistance. The territory still smelled strongly of them, but no guards came to investigate the foreign scent in their home. A stroke of fortune for Ephraim, at last.

He found their caches quickly, snooping about the territory with a slowly growing sense of unease. Each one he came across was empty. He dug them up with the fervor of a man whose sole need in life was their contents, but there was no food to be found in Asterism Grove's former territory. These wolves, unbeknownst to Ephraim, had faced worse hardships than he when they exhausted their food supply while trapped here.

Frustration bubbled in his throat in the form of a growl as yet another former cache produced nothing. That was when the coywolf gave up and returned to the rocks, which he struggled over in a more foul mood and less inconspicuous manner than he had when entering.

Eventually Wraen had grown tired of sitting at home and waiting. It was days, Elfie still had not showed up and the hope that he would return alive and as well as it was possible was dwindling. The winter days were bitter cold, snowy, the food was very hard to come by and with their numbers having increased, the mantel of leadership was heavier to bear than it had ever been before. So with an earnest wish to escape, to be useful, to find the boy - dead or alive - she left the copse and went to the strath. 

Wraen resisted all the useless "what if"s that had begun to plague her mind, but she did regret speaking harshly to Eljay, because now he had lost two people dear to him due to events that could not have been either predicted or prevented. Yet... yet she knew that her pack mate would feel resentment towards her. Grief and pain needs a relief in a form of a guilty person. Someone to blame for all of the misfortunes. And with all that was happening simultaneously, Wraen did not wish to deal with this as well.

Therefore she focussed on her mission and, when almost there, she caught sight of a running wolf. "ELFIE!" she called loudly and began to ran towards the stranger.

Patrolling just wasn't enough to keep her mind off matters; in fact, the largely uneventful circuits gave her far too much time to get lost inside her own head. When Towhee stumbled across the Sovereign's scent trail departing from the copse, she seized the opportunity for a better distraction. Towhee hadn't forgotten Wraen's invitation to check the grove's perimeters for any sign of their wayward brethren. If she caught up to her there, she would let the leader know she was ready.

But when she reached the foot of the broken wall, Towhee stopped and licked her lips nervously. She kept taking abortive footsteps forward, only to freeze again. Every one of her instincts screamed against climbing back into the hideaway. Eventually, she turned away, hissing out a bitter sigh as she closed her eyes. She couldn't bring herself to go in there, though she could wait until Wraen reemerged, see if she'd found anything and wanted to resume the search around the exterior.

She retreated toward the nearest bend in the river. Towhee intended to sit but found herself too restless. Instead, she began to pace to and fro, keeping her attention on the pass's jagged, rocky mouth, bright eyes peeled for any sign of the Sovereign.

Feel free to skip me until they come out of the grove. :)

As quiet as the former pack's territory was on the inside, the borders were another story. Ephraim was barely over the rocks when an unfamiliar voice called out to him, although the name was totally wrong. His first instinct was to freeze on the spot, but ample time alone had taught him to push past that instinct and keep moving instead. Stopping was a surefire way to allow an enemy into striking distance, and he didn't know if this wolf was a friend or a foe.

Everyone was a foe, of course, but some showed their teeth more readily than others. So he scrambled down the other side and paced evenly, cutting a diagonal line that would bring him close enough to Wraen to speak, but not close enough for her to get the jump on him. He swept his long tail low at his hocks, hoping to maintain a guise of friendliness until he could get a better read on her intentions.

As for Elfie, he had no idea who that was. Ephraim was tempted to play along in the event this Elfie was someone who looked just like him, but the coywolf doubted it enough to not commit to that. The advantages pretending to be Elfie would grant weren't worth the risk. Instead, Ephraim lifted his narrow snout and called back a vague, what?

It had been a very foolish hope - with this in mind Wraen would have saved herself the gravity of utter disappointment, when she came closer and saw that the face looking back at her was not of the dear boy's. It was entirely foreign, though, while the last remnants of the feverish idea that this wolf was somehow Eljay's son flowing away, she traced his features many times to seek even the tiniest bit of familiarity. 

It was not meant to be. "Nothing," she shook her head and bit against the tears that were about to well up in her eyes. "I thought you were someone I knew," she added. "We... we lost a young boy here recently. Fire-red pelt, almost an adult. He disappeared during an earthquake that took place here and has not been seen since."

Nothing, said the grey-brown female, and Ephraim frowned at her. At least that more or less confirmed his suspicion that whoever Elfie was, they didn't look enough alike to be mistaken for one another up close. He hid his disappointment well; it would've been nice to be able to poach from whatever pack this woman belonged to by pretending to be the lost child, but from the sounds of it, this Elfie was a lot younger than Ephraim. Youthful though his slight figures may have made him look, that wasn't a jig he could keep up for long.

Fire-red pelt called to mind two wolves, one whom he hardly remembered and one he could not forget for the trouble her capture had caused his former pack, and neither of them was a juvenile boy. Sorry, can't help you, Ephraim grunted as he cleared the last of the stones in an effort to quit this abandoned territory. Don't know anyone like that. The wolves in these parts are mostly good folks, in my experience. If he's alive, some pack probably took him in. Bet if you visit them all, he'll turn up.

Seemed much more likely that Elfie was dead, but, well ... Ephraim had lost all his honor, but not his streak of empathy, and he couldn't bring himself to say something that cruel to someone who was clearly torn up. He might've offered some condolences then, said he could keep an eye out, ease Wraen's troubled mind just a little, but honestly, he really only cared about himself these days and that sounded like Work.

I didn't mention @Towhee in my post in case you don't want to join in yet, but Ephraim was sort of leaving Hideaway Strath in my first post and is continuing to go that way, so it's probably safe to assume she could see them now if you wanted to hop back in?

Thanks for the tap!

There was movement in the thrawn pass, causing Towhee to go very still very suddenly. Her ears twisted backward at the sight of Wraen with what appeared to be a coyote. She squinted, feeling a telltale rumbling in her throat, but as they came a little closer, she could see they were engaged in conversation. And the stranger behaved like kindred; perhaps he was a mix. Towhee didn't really care, though she kept her eyes trained on the pair, slightly mistrustful and prepared to run interference if Wraen needed her.

It occurred to her that she should probably make her presence known. Unlocking her limbs, Towhee called, "Hey!" and said nothing else, for the moment. She would wait until they cleared the hideaway's crushed throat.

Wraen listened to the coyote mix speak and, though she had not been asking for either civility or friendliness, she appreciated that he gave her a lie to believe in. That the boy had not been crushed and suffocated by rocks, that somehow, somewhere he had made it out alive. That someone had found him and taken good care of him. She had failed him, she could not longer do anything to change things, but maybe... maybe... someone had. 

"Were you looking for someone here yourself?" Wraen asked, just in case the man had been in the strath for a similar reason. Had the circumstances been less harsh, she would have extended a welcome to visit the copse and have a meal before heading off. But since her pack had so many people and only so much food that no one had to starve, but no one had enough either, she did not say anything of the sort. Towhee appeared and the Sovereign mindfully turned to her cousin, gave her a watery smile and said: "Hey, Towhee! Just asking this gentleman, if he had seen Elfie around."

"These parts" happened to be vast and sprawling, so if Elfie was alive and running with a pack, there was no guarantee that Wraen would ever find him. Absently, Ephraim wondered if the missing boy was better off that way. There were days he would claim that he'd been better off found by Drageda than dying on his own... and there were other days he believed the exact opposite. If not for Drageda, might his family have found him instead? Might he have run with them instead of their enemies, thus branded as one himself?

It wasn't worth dwelling on, and luckily, Wraen broke him out of his thoughts before he could dive too deep into them. He licked his lips and appeared pensive for a beat, but ultimately, said, nope. Just walkin'. It wasn't completely true and if Wraen wanted to question him, she would find it easy. Hideaway Strath had exactly one way in and out, not counting the hidden tunnel that the missing boy had slipped away through, so it wasn't like he'd wandered through from another direction. But even if questioned, he wouldn't supply a true answer.

Up came his head and tall ears alike when a second wolf, black as pitch with rusted sides and a bright white belly, called out in a voice that was just... off. Ephraim couldn't describe it if he tried. It was like feeding a computerized robot voice through mud so that it was intelligible, but stilted and garbled all at once. It immediately put his back up (was she sick?) and he glanced at Wraen with a clipped, we done here?

The leader's lips formed the two syllables of Elfie's name and Towhee swallowed. Before she could respond, the stranger said something to Wraen that she didn't catch. If she was reading his body language correctly, he was preparing to depart. The fact that he glanced at her but didn't offer a greeting or introduction seemed to corroborate this.

She didn't have the mental energy to feel bothered by this, so she too looked to Wraen questioningly. "I was going to see if you wanted to do that perimeter sweep," she offered, shooting the coyote lookalike a sideways glance but otherwise mutually and benignly ignoring his presence.

"I won't detain you any longer," Wraen replied, when she saw that the stranger was in no mood to continue the conversation. What could they really talk about? "Have safe travels," she said her farewells quietly, waited for the fellow to leave and then turned to Towhee, who was standing nearby.

"Let's do that perimeter sweep," she agreed. "Maybe we find some lead," she added, but her smile did not reach her eyes. Wraen did not believe that they would find anything - not now, when so much time had passed already. Doing nothing would be even more painful and unbearable.

Last one from me - thanks for the thread!

Sure, he replied, glancing again at the black-and-red wolf when she spoke to the other one. Jesus, her voice was messed up. Ephraim might've felt a little bad about the snap judgment and the concern if he knew it was simply because she was deaf, but he didn't. Instead, he assumed it was an illness and all he wanted was to get far away before he could catch whatever had made her sound so terrible.

He didn't offer any well wishes of his own. He didn't care about the well-being of these strangers, and that would no doubt be mutual if they knew whose son he was. He simply turned and departed, shivering once at the intrusive, immediate memory of Towhee's grating tone calling out across the distance.