Moonspear when someone leaves your life,

She had run out of tears to cry by the time she realized where she was going. It made her itch, to be in the lowlands like this.

So, while her brain drifted far away, she walked until she climbed.

Tullik stopped where she stood, paws barely pushing through the snow. It was cold, indifferent, the rocks as judgmental and silent as the day she had first saw them. It seemed, even away from the mountains that had tethered her soul, nothing changed. It was just as brutal and as beautiful as the last winter she had lived. The deathly silence did not drown out the low, distant wail that was ever present in her ears. The wind pushed at her form, it’s wailing just the same as the one she could hear in the deepest parts of her ear.

The girl took a little breath.

She was alone, here, and the shroud of grey only made the feeling invade the deepest parts of her. She made to step forward, only to pause.

The wind had been telling her something. A scent drifted from the distance. A claim. Here, on the mountain? 

Tullik stumbled forward. Maybe some of her people had gathered here. It was a hope she immediately shot down, killing it ruthlessly before it could take root. 

She was alone in this. Of that she was certain.

She paused on the edges of the claim, shivering not from the cold, unable to strangle out even the smallest of sounds.

Njord scouted their new perimeter scuffing his paws and leaving frequent marks until he felt dehydrated. It was never too much, Njord felt, to overprotect their small, newborn pack.

Moonspear’s weather turned fierce and Njord felt the cold bite right down to his skin. It was then he came across a young wolf. Njord’s expression jumped, hoping it was Swordfish! But as he drew nearer, it turned out to be a girl not much older than his own son.

He was disappointed, but not enough to ignore the she-wolf who appeared to be in a state. If anything, he felt empathetic. “Are ye lost, lass?” Njord asked in his token Scottish brogue.

An accent! Such a thing as she had never heard before, breaking the shell long enough for her to cast a wide eyed look at the man who spoke in such a way. So different from her own language, the trader’s tongue twisted on the way out.

It made her horribly curious and frightened in equal measures.

Tullik licked her jaws in an anxious measure, suddenly all too aware of how small she was.

…does not know where she is. Her voice was a bare murmur.

This one greets you, odd-talker. I am known as Tullik.

Odd? Njord almost laughed in response, but the naive doe-eyes of the lass made the man hold his composure. She looked forlorn with a wan mien… and Njord felt the pattern of her speech was reminiscent of Sialuk’s or Kigipigak’s. Was she of a Northern bloodline?

“Ah’m called Njord,” he offered in response. “Ye stand on tha border of Moonspear, a new claim.” Njord took a moment to look around towards the forest and its windy boughs. It didn’t smell like anything dangerous followed…

“Where were ye headed, lass?” he asks, hopeful she could be pointed in the correct direction. Though, his wife Meerkat could provide better insight about the lay of the land.

Tullik licked her lips again, anxiety thrumming like a living thing through her. Periwinkle stared out from her gaunt face, before she looked up at the distant tip of the mountain.

I was going up. She croaked after a moment to the odd talker, this “Njord”. The tip of the mountain called to her like an old friend, singing a song she could hear even now.

I like that. Going up. As if just discovering that for herself.

Slowly, the girl’s harrowing vulnerability dawns on him. Perhaps it's her nervous swimming of the eyes or her dissociative statement that made Njord put two and two together. The man looks around. She was out here, alone… and nobody was coming.

The father thinks of his daughter Mercy and his heart tightens.

But Moonspear was only just founded with few resources for themselves and nothing to share. They had made no large kills and that meant no caches. If they were near saltwater, he could provide her a crab or mussel… but the man had yet to learn how to hunt this new, wild land.

Nevertheless, he beckons. “Come, let’s move ye out of the weather, lassie. There’s a large pile o’ trees with an ol' den not far.” Shelter.

She responded to the prompting in the same way she had been walking, almost robotic. Jittery, though, as if she had been in a constant adrenaline high. The janky, stuttering movements of an old arcade animatronic, alive for so long but without repair.

Something that should have been shut down ages ago.

Tullik nodded her thanks to the odd-talker when she remembered to, though her eyes drifted to the peak again. She was meant to go up.

She wanted to, she needed to, but why?

This she could not put together. The puzzle pieces were scattered in a dark room, and the blistering bolts of clarity she got occasionally were akin to the flash of a Polaroid camera, lighting the room for only a second before everything fell into darkness again.

You are odd. Odd-talker. She was repeating herself, the words barely mumbled out.

The girl had enough cognizance left to follow, like how a lost lamb clung to the side of its shepherd. Njord couldn’t really make out her mumbling above the wind, but it put a new fire under him. She appeared to be fading and Njord was certain she wouldn’t last the cold winter night alone.

Eventually, the pair arrived at the holdout. “In here, lass,” Njord invited. The space was small, but it would fit both of them. Njord crawled in first and pressed himself against the wall of the modest den to make room. At least she would be able to get warm and rest… then, they could go from there.

Through the thin glass of her composure, Tullik thought with idle humor of her rapid heartbeat, the faint tremble of her legs.

Ah came the wry thought so this is what it feels like.

The mountain closed cold fingers around her like the steel jaws of a trap, digging into her soul like the teeth dug into the broken bones of the legs they caught. Though this trap was one she set herself. It was in a distant way that she noted her fading consciousness, and the moments between were lost to a fog she had no hope ever escaping.

Lost in an ice fog forever. How mountaineers died.

Tullik blinked when the odd-talker spoke, her eyes lifting from the distant point she had been staring at, to the cramped space in front of her. She pressed her still over-large ears back like a fawn, but followed with robotic, jittery stiltedness. 

There, she would nose the dirt for a moment, before her legs folded beneath her and she went to the ground. Finally, moaned the tired muscles, we are resting. But the girl’s brain ran in circles around itself, even as her physical form remained exhausted.

Njord could see the arthritic way she moved, like a reanimated wight. The light of her eyes waned, expression neutral and slack.

Feebly, the girl managed to curl against the seafarer. She was frigid to the touch. Njord did his best to shuffle and wrap around her to share his warmth. His grand head laid across her body, like a weighted blanket, and his red tail covered her toes. A memory of being trapped in a snow cave with Haunt tickled the back of his brain…

“Dinna fash, mo naoidheachan” Njord hummed, “ye are safe. Rest, now.”

Instinct was a grand thing, came the mercurial note, as the girl curled her body like a mink into the warmth offered by the great, large odd-talker.

She was also very tired, her eyelids drooping with every breath she drew into her chest. Her conscious thought wavered, and she raised her head, though it felt weighed down by so many stones, and she cast it upwards to rest upon the outside of a thigh, like a pillow for her travel weary head.

Her eyes closed and, for a time, she could imagine happiness in the warmth. A smile curved her features.

Thank you. Her voice was quiet, as cold as the snow she had walked out of.

The two of them wrapped together like squirrels in a nest. For a while, the girl was so cold against Njord that it kept him awake and vigilant. He watched as her head slumped, sleep finally finding the unfortunate, weary traveler.

The wind howled and whistled outside. How many unlucky wolves had met their end on the mountain’s unforgiving range?

Sleep found Njord too. The stressors from the week drained the majority of his energy. After thirty minutes his eyes shut, comfortable against another warm body.

----

After a few hours, Njord awoke and slipped from the den to hunt. In a short amount of time, he returned with a meager meal – a vole – for the girl. He could not yet fish the frozen water and did not know enough about Moonspear’s terrain to catch anything larger.

His head poked into the den’s opening. Was she awake?

It took her some time to pull from the dark void of sleep, it sucked at her like a primordial sea swallowing a ship. But the cold had returned, and Tullik blearily raised her head in search of the odd-talker.

She blinked, and in the spaces of darkness between her blink, there he was. Holding food, though she was unsure of who for. It perhaps did not help that she was barely awake to begin with, the journey here exhausting in every measure.

She licked her nose wordlessly.

Two lilac eyes stared back at him, though Njord could hardly call her expression alert. He placed the vole on the ground and rolled it to her with a flick of his nose.

“Ah wee piece fer ye,” he offered.

The seafarer backed away from the den and smelled the air absentmindedly, as if in thought.

The vole landed with a meaty thud in front of her and she stared at it, for a time. Then, the scent of blood, the scent of meat, it awoke the hungry creature that lived in her chest and in the pit that had become her stomach.

She descended upon the meager meal like it was a twelve course feast, crunching her way through the delicate bones and struggling to swallow the entire thing whole. It didn’t work, but she imagined it.

In the end, all that would be left was scraps of fur, some scattered bone, and a slightly swaying Tullik, eyes shadowed with her tired lids.

The young woman gobbled up what Njord had offered and he remembered how his son, Swordfish, had done much the same in the Roja den.

He wondered - what trials had this wolf been through?

“Ye may rest as long as you’d like lass,” Njord offered. He had done all that he could for her. He pondered a moment longer. "And ye may find sanctuary in our pack, Moonspear, if that is what ye seek,” but he was unsure if she would tarry here much longer.

“Do ye have a name?” Njord asked.

He offered Moonspear to her. She assumed that was the village she was now resting in, the village at the top of the mountain she’d been drawn to. It didn’t take much for her to begin vigorously nodding.

I want to. Stay. It’s tall, here. I like tall. A bolt of clarity shot through her when he spoke of her name, and she inhaled to begin speaking.

Tullik Pitsâtailik, sired by Pattangaititsik from the womb of Tusannituk. She managed to get out before the fog descended back upon her head.

Last from me!

Despite the staccato of her speech, the lass managed to string together a coherent thought. Njord had plenty of patience and listened carefully. It appeared his hunch was correct - the names of her and her family were of a northern tongue.

“Rest easy an’ well, Tullik,” he said softly. “I willnae be far. When my leader returns from her travels I will bring ye tae meet her.”

It was clear the girl was fading fast back into sleep. Njord gave her space and left to stand vigil in the forest beyond.

By the time he finished speaking to her, she was already fading, colors swimming before her eyes, the world becoming a technicolor spiral.

He left, her head hit the ground, and she slept.

Fade!