Dragoncrest Cliffs Where we break when our hearts are strong enough

And though she spoke in a clear and quiet tone, Ephraim spooked so badly that he slipped and tumbled off the cliff, smashing his head on the rocks below.

Ha, ha, no he didn't. He almost did, though, with one forepaw slipping into thin air and causing him to lurch frighteningly. With his heart hammering wildly, he backpedaled away from the edge and sunk down, weighed by how close he'd come to facing his own mortality. More than once recently. He could have died in the fighting, too, with how he'd lost his head. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him before now that he wasn't invincible. Drageda was invincible, having never lost a fight with anything less than Mother Nature herself, but her warriors were not.

Easy was one of the last wolves he wanted to come face-to-face with, but he forced himself to meet her eyes, and his buckled with shame. How had he mistaken her for some idiot that had plunged into the fray outnumbered three to one? She looked nothing like that. Her silver coat was brushed thickly with dark shades of grey all over; she wasn't solid silver like his attempted assailant. There was no resemblance at all.

I... he said, with his tongue rough as sandpaper in his mouth, I'm sorry, I... Everyone's faces just kind of... melted off... and I couldn't recognize anyone anymore. I thought you were one of them. I swear I'm not a traitor. It all came out in a tumble. He didn't know that their enemies had claimed he was their kin—he'd been long gone by that point and had heard nothing of it, though his subconscious had certainly registered it—but this conclusion of his seemed obvious even without that knowledge. He'd attacked one of his own. That made him a traitor, didn't it? Surely his pack mates thought so, but as he hung his head, his champagne eyes were desperately lit with the hope that maybe she wouldn't hate him, and hadn't come to tell him he was to leave.