It was dark, the night her father had buried the corpses he claimed was her mother and Azure. Ari had no interest in sleeping, and even less interest in sleeping surrounded by her family. She didn't know her father hadn't gone to the family's den to sleep, because she never returned there herself. Oh, she had no intention of running away, any more than she had ever had when she'd snuck out. She just needed to not be around them and to not be where they could find her. Instead she'd taken off from pack lands, using every trick she'd ever learned from long seasons of sneaking away and avoiding the rest of her family's companions. Coating herself in mud, laying false trails, running along the bed of a river wide deep and wide enough to make her scent difficult to find along it... and making her escape into the soulless forest, where the perpetual mists would mute scent and the swampy, fungus-y, mossy scent of the forest itself was cloying to the nose.

In fact, it so deadened the nose that she'd very nearly walked up on Asla and had had to backpedal furiously to avoid crossing paths with her older sister and the giant purple brother she really only knew from the meeting and had no reason to think she could trust anymore than she could trust Asla - which was to say, about as far as she could throw a horse. Why were they even here? Why couldn't they have picked literally anywhere else to meet up and yell at each other? She couldn't even imagine what was making them shout and make such hideous noises, but her mother surely would have made them both take a bath, they reeked so much of such a weird musky smell.

Of course that thought, the thought of her mother, had set off the pain that had been momentarily shocked from her by the sudden danger, cutting into her like a knife and she'd fled, heedless of whether her siblings heard her, but after a moment she made herself begin once again to hide her trail. Tears burned her eyes and clogged her throat when she finally stopped and jammed herself into a hollow beneath a fallen tree, curled into a miserable, wet ball of black and purple fur. Tansy leaped up into the dead branches of the tree to hide herself, clearly troubled, but not knowing how to help. Even the normally loud and brash jay was quiet, fluffing himself up against the mists in his perch nearby. Despite the tears that threatened, she couldn't bring herself to actually cry, just curled up around the pain in her chest and keened silently at the innocence she'd lost that day when her father had said Zee's name.

Ophie had been distant, just a ghost since the funeral. She hadn't attended, didn't have the heart to, but she knew what had happened all the same. Dark and terrible things; the smell of burned flesh and charred remains was stuck in the back of her throat. Thick enough to make her want to gag. In tragedy family ought to pull together, to support each other when they needed it the most, but even from the side lines she saw her family fracturing. Splitting at the seams as they were pulled in all manner of directions. Everything was ruined, wrong in the worst of ways and Ophie just couldn't find the resolve to just smile and keep making do.

She'd never had much of a sense of drive or direction in her life, simply going with the Fatalis-flow but now the world felt slanted beneath her paws as she wandered aimlessly. Unable to so much look any of her packmates or family members in the eye. What would they think of her? That she was a coward? Weak? They wouldn't be wrong. She waited for the impeding sense of guilt and dread that usually followed such anxious thoughts, the urge to scramble to do and be better but she felt nothing. Just tired and alone. Even the world sounded quieter than it should, the noises dull and lifeless as though her ears were stuffed with cotton. If she was being followed then she didn't care to check, she wasn't a puppy anymore and the muck and mud that clung to her form was the only normal thing about her that day.

Everything else was off, like someone else was wearing her façade.

She stumbled to a stop, the earth squelching beneath her paws. Sometimes she wanted to lay down and become one with the greens and browns, to rot and just be like that old log over there. Except old trunks didn't tend to be purple. Ophie blinked slowly, her brows drawn as an elegant "huh" passed her dry lips. Had she the sense to she would have glanced about and spotted her sisters companions, but she didn't and simple just... looked, her eyes not picking up on the finer details of things.