Moonspear one
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#1
All Welcome 
she is back on the mountain. morning dawns, and she is whole, and shattered, all at once. gaze finds herself, reflected blurrily in the careful ice that stretches over the pool. as if mesmerized, she traces the edges of the figure. it is her mother that stares back at her; hateful, tense. 

she feels empty; there is only the hate, the anger. everything else has fallen away. it is sharp, broken glass, the tighter she clutches it, the deeper it cuts. 

shattering ice; a forelimb punctures through the ice. the gentle scraping of ice on ice, cold. and then it stills again. things have settled, stilled; she is made of hate and ire.
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#2
After witnessing Kukutux's acceptance from on high, Dragomir had done a long patrol of the border and then gone to seek his sister out. By then, she had already vacated the territory in her rage. He'd followed her scent out just past the borders, then made the difficult decision not to follow. He'd seen her down there among the others, however briefly, and he knew she probably needed time.

It made him curious. He hadn't been able to hear anything that was said and had scarcely been able to make out the wolves present, so he was missing a lot of information. What had been said? A day passed before he tried to seek his sister out again. He found her at the edge of one of Moonspear's pools.

The sound of ice shattering filled his ears while the sight of Isi punching through the ice filled his sights. He faltered, splaying his ears and drawing his brows up with concern. Isi?
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#3
she'd always had hope, really. beneath that anger, that ire, remained the possibility that there could be some explanation for her mother's many disappearances, that despite her frequent abandonings, she'd meant to bear them, and loved them still. that despite how oft she'd reminded herself of her hate, imagined what cutting things she'd say to the woman should she ever have returned, it would take only the right words, the right apology, the right display of affection from the woman, and she would—

"drago," she responds, spinning to face him. he is a rock, the one member of her family who has never let her down, he - he got better without you. he is better without you. she inhales, sharply, ears flattening a moment to match his. "I—I look like her. and she never wanted us, we never meant anything, she didn't even mention us and she knew-" exhale and she stops. 

"why am I, are we, alive? it's her fault, but she's completely apathetic. I always thought, maybe—no." she's coming undone, and she dumping it all on him. he understands, he loves her, and yet he's better without you. "I'm sorry." 
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Dragomir had to take a moment to pull a slow breath through his nose. He'd never seen his sister frantic like this before, and it was frankly terrifying to watch her come apart at the seams. She'd always been the strong one, his pillar through everything. It was heartbreaking and painful to watch the same realization he'd come to months ago playing across her features now.

You don't look like her, he said, emphatic as he swept toward her. You look like dad. Just like dad, but with light fur, and it's still darker than hers. Isilmë was too wild a creature to look anything like Aurëwen, he thought. It was easy for him to say. The most he'd inherited from his mother was her soft eyes, ordinary teeth and the silver ticking throughout his pelt. He didn't live in a body that served as a constant reminder of her.

He slowly sat in the snow a mere foot from her, turning pensive eyes to the ice she'd cracked and wondered how she did it without hurting her leg. A question for another time. I asked dad once why they had us if they didn't really want us and he said there wasn't a reason. He said sometimes wolves just... have babies and then grow apart. It's not supposed to mean they don't love us. It says a lot about her and nothing about us that she didn't.

He pressed his lips into a thin line. Hydra says she's just a great pretender and that she's living a lie. Don't you think that's really sad? Her new life isn't even real. He wasn't sad for Aurëwen, but he found it sad how she must craft a life out of lies now. All just to run away from her problems. Aure was, he'd realized, more of a child than he was. Than Isi was. I wanted Hydra to kill her but she said we should kill her power over us instead. She's not family anymore and she'll never be able to undo that. She never deserved us.
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#5
his reassurances are met with silence, her mind working still. he's wrong. is he right? he sits, gaze moving to rest on the cracked ice. her own remains on him, muzzle lowering slightly as she tries to still the frantic burn beneath her skin. his words go uncontested; some part of her wants to believe them without doubt, but the larger part of her makes that impossible. 

she shifts, moving finally to sit as he does. "but how?" she asks finally, in reference to his final words. "she still gave birth to us, abandoned us, chose not to love us. I can't ignore that, I can't — she chose a lie over us." her tail lashes, sharply, irritation prickling all along her spine. she can not put word to most of the abstract, sharp-edged thoughts, exhaustion and reason can no longer dull the blade of her hate.
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#6
The anguish in his sister's voice was painful to hear. It had been Dragomir's own anguish not so long ago. He, too, struggled with Aurëwen's cold and uncaring decisions, but he'd finally found it in him to let go of her. He'd finally realized the kind of wolf she was, and realized he was a hundred times better than that. The best he could do was ensure that he didn't go down the same path as her in his future. His eyes followed the lower of his sister's head, the agitated lash of her tail, and he whined.

We didn't choose her, Dragomir said, resigned. We didn't have a choice, but that doesn't mean she ever deserved us. It was difficult to put into words the realizations he'd come to during his time in Moonspear. If he could rewrite time and have a choice then he would've chosen any woman other than Aurëwen for a mother, but that simply wasn't how the world worked. She chose to leave us and not love us because she only cares about herself, he said. It's pathetic. She's broken. Her whole life now, pretending we don't exist, is a lie. We're better than that and we're better than her.

He wanted to ask what was said at the borders to fuel his sister's breakdown, but he wasn't willing to drive Isilmë over a brink merely to satiate his own morbid curiosity. So he never asked. He simply sat with her, trying to talk her down, until she felt better.