Phantom Hollow as the land relinquished her ghost

the woman's nose hangs low over the earth as she follows the muffled scent of prey and blood, somewhere directly before her. it takes her a moment longer to pinpoint the scent as coming from a loose pile of overturned earth and decaying foliage. wasting no time, she picks through the covering and extracts the body of a hare, half torn away already, leaving a jutting spine and a front end. pinning it down, she tears it carefully in two before sniffing up and down the length, already beginning to salivate. when she declares it safe, cassiopeia wastes no time in devouring all she can of her find.

The Silencer was swathed in his typical cloak of shadows, slipping silently betwixt looming trunks, soldiers who'd fought the rage of winter - a rusty scent of blood had drawn him near, but he did not step from the cover of the treeline. Clouds slithered in the sky but, for once, did not fall to hang above the ground as mist; his view was clear, observing as the charcoal woman buried her snout in the remains of the rabbit's corpse.

Her scent was familiar in the way that Charon's had been, but sharper, pressing at his memories like a finger dipped in ice. Conspiracies and ponderings tumbled through his skull, but he observed still - to be sure, and to conjure the most efficient approach; would she still hold such powerful rage toward him? Would she attempt to slaughter him as she had their father? Aries was almost intruiged to see, to perhaps discover if anything remained between the two mercenaries, who'd been cast into a life of misgiving and betrayal. Luminiferous pools flickered back from the devoured meal to the starborn, examining the situation from afar before finally feeding his insatiable curiousity and stepping forth from the darkness of which he'd been born.

"Cassiopeia. Long time no see." came the humourless statement, gruff voice rumbling into the frigid wind as a royal wave would growl to the shore; in truth, he maintained no resentment toward his sibling, but could she say the same when she witnessed Aries' own scarred visage?

she pulls her muzzle from the prey at her feet when the distinct prickle of intuition runs down her spine; she is ever more cautious when eating someone else's prey. there passed a moment, two, in which nothing but the quiet symphony of the night played to her ears, and then he slunk from the shadows, strange and cold and entirely familiar. she watches cooly as he steps from the shadows in which he loves to slink, and finds him entirely different from when she'd seen him last. he has grown completely into his adult frame, and rests comfortably at a height a few inches taller than her own.  "aries." her gaze pulls back up to his face, impassive. 

she wondered, now and again, how disappointment must plague Olive to know that her first litter had produced wolves such as herself and Aries. she did not think her mother capable of it, in truth, but wondered idly when last she'd seen her firstborn son. "are you still slinking after that woman and her people?"  she referred, of course, to Nyx and the other Melonii. She'd no idea what had happened to them after the fall of the wood, and frankly didn't care unless they should come to threaten Maegi's claim - while she would not join them, she would fight on their side should it ever come to it, knowing she could not stand by and allow the girl and her siblings to be ousted, the wood sink back to what it was.

The figure bathed in ebony was undoubtedly his sibling - though, during his absence, she had changed. Grown. Inevitable it was, but even so, it was peculiar to be looking at one he'd spent so much time with in the womb, somehow a stranger, abnormal to witness where their own paths had led. Her expressions were locked away, emotions chained inside where none could touch them; so it occured to the silencer that they were not all that different. 

"I do not abandon without reason." came his rumbling baritones, voice a steel-born sweep of tenebrosity. His presence within the clan was needed now more than ever, when Nyx and Damien's offspring would arrive in their den and the territory they claimed was in need of extra defense. He had little reason to leave, so leave he would not.