Mortis and Halo were busy. She understood that. She also understood that she could not cling to them forever. That she would have to make her way in the pack at some point or another. Yet, it was hard. With the inability to speak, connecting with other pack members was difficult and she found her shyness to be overwhelming. There was still that drive. The drive to stay alive. If she wasn't doing something productive, it meant risking being kicked out. The Warlord was terrifying enough that she did not want to risk feeling his true wrath.

With that fear always poking at the back of her brain, she had gone toward the outskirts of the Armada. Watching, waiting, using her endless amounts of patience. When she wasn't assisting Halo with the vast garden beds, she was out in the forest, in the gorge, watching and waiting. For every prey animal that was large enough to hunt, she would try to keep a tab on them. While navigating was useless to her, speaking was nonexistent, and the capacity to understand healing was out of reach, she could at least try to hunt. She knew how to run, how to wait, how to watch, how to scent and track.

Thankfully, hunting was coming easily to her.

The thrill of the chase. The driving force that made her paws eat up the ground and dig in until blood spilled beneath her paws. It helped keep the fear away. The fear ate at her stomach and her heart the more days that Halo and Mortis seemed too busy to keep up with her. So she was left to her own devices. While she had gotten help taking the doe down from a loner, she would take the credit and come back to Armada with a full rear leg in tow with most of the hindquarter meat attached. She had taken care to wrap it in fir boughs so that it would not dirty and spoil by the time she had drug it to where she believed the Warlord to be.

Setting the gift down softly on the ground, she stands up straight. Calling out to the Warlord, she waits. Silent, patient, and unmoving. No matter how long he kept her waiting, she would stand there. He had to come around eventually, right?

Marshal was the one that got his attention, and directed him towards the mute wolf. Through how the bird understood she wanted him, he didn’t know. He made his way through the Col, following the scent of fresh meat. He found the small slave girl not far from where he had been working, an impressively large leg of meat beside her.

His eyes moved from her, to the meat, and back again. “Impressive work” He said conversationally. Through what one said to a mute wolf was still something of a mystery to him. He came a little closer, reaching out a paw to touch the meat. Wondering what she was attempting to say by bringing this to him first instead of their stores. “Is this your way of saying you wish to be a hunter?”


"Speech"

Art by Salt