Shadowwyn Moor Don't you know it is just the chemicals in our veins that causes pain?

Paging Saatsine!

After her encounter with Winter’s Wake at Qeya River, Shadowpaw had enough information to begin tracking the “reindeer herders” Southbound. It was a fairly easy thing to do, for their path closely followed the large herds of caribou who churned the ground wherever they ran.

To both her surprise and horror, the trail led through Lost Creek Hollow. Her birthplace. The home of her Moonpool. She picked out the familiar scent of Ksura among them. More questions than ever before began to pop up in Shadowpaw’s mind as her imagination architected what could have possibly happened to her mother and family.

Shadowpaw skulked near Shadowwyn Moor as the odor of wolfscent became strong.

morwenna's sister had come to join the saatsine, and while sun eater was pleased by this turn of events, they compelled the chieftain to look toward the taiga once more.

he was not yet ready to leave, and toyed idly with a caribou femur, letting it drop so he might kick it across the glossy drifts. a thin shadow drifted there, a slender spill of quillblack. he approached with the confidence earned, tail lashing once as he searched her scent for swiftcurrent and did not find it.

"who you?" commanded the hunter, his one eye making short work of her finer details.

o no i got big daddy

An imposing man interrupted Shadowpaw’s reconnaissance. He was large, brawny, blackfurred and spoke in broken common that gave the impression of a neolithic savage.

Though the girl did not know if the reindeer herders were the original threat that had driven Silvertongue, Wren, and the others from Riverclan, it was easy to see that this hale wolf was capable predator. The cadence of Shadowpaw’s heartbeat quickened when she fell under the scrutiny of his one eye… yet even he could not make the apprentice’s bloated ego shrink.

“A traveler,” Shadowpaw replied without giving away any particulars. Her hunched body crept backwards to keep a healthy distance between them.

“I followed your trail from the Taiga… I seek the wolves of Qeya River… There were gifted healers among them,” she said as one ear turned as if to punctuate her sentence with a question mark.

lol not big daddy haha

 

this one too wore a star, but there the resemblance to morwenna ceased. had the stranger been hungry? she wore the marks of a rough life in her pelt and musculature.

"river is mine. hunters are mine. when i come, no healers." and no leaders, though he kept this information aside for now. nostrils scrutinized her scent with a bovine snort. 

that femur lay in the drifts behind him, forgotten at present. who was she?

"some stay. others go. name?" he uttered in a second command, direct as he wished. there were caribou to hunt and blood to be spilled steaming into the white snow.

The shepherd’s simple answers only fabricated more questions in Shadowpaw’s mind. Had he taken the river? Had Wren never returned? Had most of the pack abandoned Qeya before the hunters arrived? Where had they gone?

"The ones I'm looking for are named Ash Star, Wren, or Ksura. They had children, too. Do you know them?" she asked

He asked her name again, but Shadowpaw was reluctant to give it up.

“I'm Morwenna,” she lied, the pseudonym randomly plucked from her conversation with Winter’s Wake.

It was a bad choice.

"not know these names," sun eater growled impatiently, though the stranger's next claim provoked a cold chuckle.

"morwenna is wife to me," came the cut of flashing teeth. but the star on her forehead was undeniable, and again he suspected the things he had refused to know.

long limbs moved in range stride to corral the younger wolf, his teeth grabbing for her now. a swiftcurrent spy, he had decided, pushed by own nerves to a breaking point which threatened to find its target in the girl if she did not submit.