The noises outside woke her sharply from her slumber, and Zee’s head shot up so quickly that her damaged horns caught upon the roof with an audible screech. The prison-like den she’d been assigned was sized well enough for a wolf of her small stature, though she found she’d spent her time not within the spacious main cavern, but curled tightly in a poorly-carved nook along the rock wall. It was a space built out of panic and necessity - somewhere enclosed and dark and quiet to hide when the summer storms arrived with their thunder. Her claws had dulled to the quick in digging it, painting the walls with dry, cracking streaks of blood. Zee crawled cautiously from her hole, pressing her emaciated form against the furthest wall from the entrance and fixing her eyes upon the door. The noises outside were familiar enough, pain, suffering, fury. There were voices too, almost as familiar as the sound of war outside her den, though she made no effort to recognize them. Zee knew she’d be expected to remain accessible when someone eventually came to collect her, so she resisted the urge to hide within her hole once more. The longer the sounds continued, the harder she found it to give the doorway a consistent eye-lock. Intimidated, she dropped her gaze to her toes, flexing and distracting herself by trying to tap her shortened claws against the den floor. She’d learned well enough by now the best ways to avoid their wrath, and surely after the events going on outside her captors would have plenty of it to redirect upon her.   "Speech"

Alive, alive, alive. It thundered like a heartbeat in his head and chest. It screamed at him from the corners of his mind. He had raced here as fast as his paws could carry him. Each step degrading his sanity a little more, until he was a form of fury and rage. Alive, alive, alive. This was all some terrible ploy, or some new apparition of his insanity. Knowing, knowing that it could not be true did not slow him any. He could not turn away, could not divert from this path. He could only run.

When night fell and his paws could carry him no further, he slept in a hollowed out tree, and woke to thrashing. The lingering memory of fire blazing and the smell of burning flesh stayed with him. No thoughts, his mind was empty. He could not think, could not think past the single word beating so quickly inside of him it threatened to burst free. Alive, alive, alive.”

And then he was off again, racing the last, short distance to the cave, well before the morning began. He struck the sentry first, like a battering ram. Hitting the smaller wolf so hard the breath was knocked from his body. He could cry an alarm, and his throat was torn before he could understand what happened. The Warlords teeth flew blood through the air. He tossed the body to the ground and continued forward. He fought wolf after wolf, but he had nowerewithal to know how many. If it lived, it did so only until he found them. Some tried to run, those he chased down. The bloody nightmare of a wolf with glassy eyes made no sound as he finished off each. And every. One of them.

Then there was just one beating heart left, one creature to stalk. He did so now, slipping through the cavern, chasing the sound of their heart beat, their breath.


"Sirius Fatalis"

Something was wrong. The thick stench of blood was beginning to seep beneath her doorway and into her den, and though the cries and warning calls outside the den sounded less, they grew louder and louder as the creature advanced. She stood obediently against the wall for as long as she could will herself to remain, but as the trickle of crimson showed itself at her door her resolve vanished. Whatever was out there, it was indiscriminately slaughtering. I'm next. She thought weakly. If this is a test, I've failed it. Zee threw herself backwards, scurrying as deep into the shallow hole as she could press herself and curling tightly into a ball. Her tail was thrown over her muzzle, her eyes squeezed shut as she did not dare peek through the scruffy fur. For a fleeting moment she considered bearing her fangs into the den, though the once-queen could not find the bravery to snarl. Her best hope was to remain unseen, which for a wolf as small as she was was not an impossible task. Zee willed her body to stop shuddering, though focusing upon the tensed muscles only coiled them tighter and intensified the vibrations. "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

He prowled into the room, following the sound of short, quiet breaths in a suddenly silent world. He stalked silent, fur glistening with a coating of blood. He paused just inside the entryway. The sound of breathing had broken off, and there was silence as the hunter held his breath also. Still and listening.

There was a sound so faint, like fur rustling in the wind, though no wind had trailed into the den with him. He turned in that direction and crept forward, closer, closer. His nose was just outside the hole now, and he was forced to bend down far to look inside. There he was met with the horned child - no, woman, small but adult in age. She shivered, tail over her muzzle and eyes squeezed shut. As scared as he had ever seen her. More afraid then when he had found her just outside Deathbelles den, hiding in the grasses, too scared to move as the thunderstorm began overhead.

It was that memory that broke him . the slackness in his eyes fell away, and pain filled it instead. She could not be alive, she could. If she was, then he had failed her in every way imaginable. He had not shielded her, he had not stopped them from taking her. He had not kept them from hurting her, he had rescued her. He had not kept faithful. He had raged and wallowed and sought comfort elsewhere, while she had huddled in the grasp of these men for six long months. No, no. It could not be true.

He wheeled away from her, spinning on his paws, shock and horror lining every part of him. “Zee.” The word was a pained gasp torn from his throat.


"Speech"

The heavy thudding of paws echoed across the chamber, second only in strength to her rapidly pounding heart. Zee felt her body grow cold, anticipation crushing her like a hungry serpent coiling around it's meal. The pounding in her head grew stronger, the near-silence in the den being slowly drowned out by the ringing echoing in her ears. This was it, death's embrace was coming. The faint light that managed past her eyelids was extinguished suddenly, and she knew he was before her. Zee waited, breath hitching in her throat to be dragged from the hole. At first, she did not recognize the voice. The name, however, drew her attention. Her captors never called her by her name - never asked - and had they have asked, she'd have surely given them her given name rather then the nickname she preferred. "Zee." The voice was pained, pained enough that the she-wolf's gaze ventured past her trembling tail and into the dim light of the den. He had turned away from her, but the distinctive markings upon his hind-end were not one she could confuse with another. "Sirius?" She whispered, still unwilling to climb from her hole. A trick of the light? A dream? A nightmare? A test, of some sort? While she wanted nothing more then to barrel into his embrace, her body froze at the sight of him and refused to leave the safety of her nook.   "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

He heard her stir, felt the way she distrubed the air, in the way one could feel when they were being watched. He did not move, just lay there with his head hung in sorrow. She was alive, and this should have been a moment of… of something else. Some sort of bursting joy and disbelief, passionate kiss as he held her to his blood soaked body and took her from this hellhole. Instead he felt a strange hollowness inside of him. A pain that grew over the numbness. He released his hold on his head and it hit the ground with a heavy thud.

“Zee.” he whispered again. “You died. I found your body, Tamsyn and I. I tried to… I tried to join you.” His confession was soft and slow, drawing it from his body like he was slowly pulling out his intestines. “And she refused to let me succumb. We took your body back to the pack. The Armada mourned you. My night terrors returned, Zee.” he whispered to the hard floor. He squeezed shut his eyes, but the tears seeped through. “It was supposed to be that I would never live longer than you. If you died, I would join you, but she would not allow me that. I tried… I tried so many ways, and she pulled me back from the brink each time until our friendship broke. I taunted Art until he bled me, but I did not die. I… I almost killed Briar.” he couldn’t shut up, he couldn’t keep himself from talking. Like a poison that needed to be drawn. “All this time while I gave in to despair, and learned to live again like broken legs relearning to walk. You were here. Every day, every minute. You were alive, and here, and hurting. I did not come for you, I did not spare you this. I was too busy wallowing in what was taken from me to realise. I… Zee. I should not have lived.”


"Speech"

Zee watched him cautiously from her hole, every strand of fur on end. Something heavy thudded hard against the floor and she retreated further, shoulders scraping against the jagged indentations of blunt claws etched into the walls. It looked like Sirius, sounded like Sirius, even smelled like Sirius. Still, she remained unconvinced, her frantic gaze darting across the den as she explored opportunities to escape. He spoke, she listened. The words failed to land, their meaning not quite reaching the cornered wolf. Sirius was here, and he was hurting, but Zee had no response for him. Was this where she shared her own struggles? Was she meant to reassure him? To forgive him? Was any of this even real? If it was a nightmare, the thunder would have already began. The lightning that followed would have split the den in two, and the blood rain would have soaked into her fur no matter where she hid. Though how, if this was real, could Sirius had found her? If as he had said, he'd not come for her, then how was he here? "Am I dead?" She whispered. "Is this Somnium?" Zee was taken back to his first words. "You died. I found your body." "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

He lifted his head at that, at her haunted whisper. His lips were pulled into a frown and his cheeks were wet. A mixture of blood and salty tears streaking through them. He turned his body at a slow crawl, facing her hiding place again. He did not try to intrude. He knew how he looked. Ravaged with blood, mostly his enemies, some his own. Tears on his cheek, and a madness in the back of his eyes. No, in her place, he would not trust himself either.

“Zee,” he said again, more softly. “I can not answer that. I don’t know. I held your corpse, watched the burnt skin pull from the bones. I… I have not had a firm grip on reality from that day. I no longer… I no longer always know what's real. Azure came to me, told me to find you here. Was he real? He died with you, our boy. “ He whispered. He wanted to comfort her, that haunted ghost in her little hole. He was afraid, so afraid, that he would touch her and find no substance.

"Speech"

The behemoth of a wolf turned on her, crawling towards her safe haven and her lip twitched, almost daring to bite. The white streaks across his eye were stained with blood and pieces of flesh, and if she focused she swore she could see blood dripping from the sabres he weaponized. She realized with a startle that she'd been looking into the killer's blue eyes, tearing her gaze off him and to the floor fast enough that the tips of her horns touched the shallow roof. "I died in the fire?" The she-wolf ventured, calling to her imagination the image of her own burnt skin flaking off the bone. "Az.. was there too." Zee confirmed quietly, unwilling to elaborate further. She'd hoped Az had made it, had escaped the flames, the capture, death. Sirius' explanation made sense to her rattled mind. Her and her son had died in that fire. Were they appearing to Sirius in a dream? No, not a dream. "If.. if I died in the fire.." Her breath caught once more, struggling to force the remaining words from her throat. "What did I do to deserve Hell?" "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

He held eyes with the beautiful tawny ghost. Nothing diminished her beauty, not the lackluster to her coat, nor the scrawniness she had come to. Not the way her claws were blunted to the quick. All they did was fan the flames of his anger. He would kill those wolves again, those demons of hell that had guarded the doors to damnation.

“I…. I do not know, Zee. I only wish I had been here with you sooner. That Tamsyn had not kept me from you.” He whispered, lowering his head to the ground again. Letting it rest against the cool stone, freezing against the flushed heat of his body. He had seen how his gaze had unnerved her, and he did not wish to capture her in it again. Where did they go from here? He did not know if this was reality or something else. If she was a ghost, a dream, a hallucination or something else entirely. She was supposed to be his touchstone, but she understood no more than he did. “You were the only thing that made sense to me. The thing that kept our pack together. Without you… You did not deserve hell, Zee. You were a mother, a guardian, a lover. You were everything good and right in my world.” His eyes were leaking again, he could not seem to stop them.


"Speech"

He expressed his regret again, and while Zee wanted to comfort him she was lost in her own self pity. When he woke from his dream, would she be returned once more to her captors? "You're here now." She told him, the only words of comfort she could manage. Even if Sirius could merely give her a reprieve, she'd take it in a heartbeat. He gave her no answer for why the God's had decided she deserved the torture, though she couldn't fault him for it. Surely there was simply something dark inside her heart, something she'd done or thought or considered one day that sealed her fate. Nothing that could be changed now. Slowly she unwound herself from her ball, crawling out from her hole at a diagonal to him to allow herself a straight line to run in should the nightmare shift and he become monstrous again. Her belly lay flat against the ground as his did, and cautiously she leaned her head toward him to place a gentle lick upon the side of his snout. He tastes real. "How are my children?" She redirected, focusing her gaze upon his bloodied paws.   "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

His ears perked up as she slowly pulled herself free of her hidey hole, and crept closer to him. She moved closer to him, and he felt a terrible yearning inside of him. A need for this to be real, and a fear that it might be. This cowering frightened creature scarcely resembled the woman he had pledged his life to.

He felt the soft rasp of her tongue, and shivered softly, shocked at the substance of it. No…

This wasn’t right, was it? Talk of ghosts and dreams clouded his judgement. He had been sent here. If only someone… someone he knew to be alive had been there too. Someone to confirm that Azure was really Azure, and the woman he had sent to fetch was really Zee.

“Azure… came home.” he whispered, but she knew that already. “Mortis came home, wishing to be heir again, to try again. Asla… Asla gave us grandchildren. Two beautiful tiny creatures with big, innocent eyes.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Briar fell in love with Art, and the two of them spend so much time together. She remembered how to be happy after her mother… after…” After Zee died, but didn’t die? He moved on.

“Gossy and Aris could not believe, I have not seen Aris since, and the lure of a tournament brought Gossy home. Kotori is pretending to be tough, Ophelia is lost and confused. They need their mother.” he paused, swallowing heavily. “The campfire. What happened, if those bodies we found… if… what happened?”

"Speech"

Zee's ear swiveled towards him, catching onto the sound of his words and drinking the information in eagerly. Her children, thriving and well even without their mother to guide them. A ghost of a smile touched her lips as she imagined Asla's tiny children, and some form of disapproval at hearing of Briar's falling in love. "They're so young still, aren't they?" She asked softly. Perhaps time moved differently here, she had stopped counting the days long ago. He continued, twisting her question until it was one of his own. Pain showed on her face, and she lifted a paw to scratch at her aching forehead absently. "It was night. I was sleeping. Az went out to hunt, I think." She kept her sentences brief, finding that the longer she reached for a memory the more that came back that she didn't want to remember. "There was a fire. Heat. Claws. Teeth." Zee's jaw clacked shut audibly and she shot the direwolf a fleeting glance, hoping he'd realize she did not want to elaborate on her capture. "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

“Not any more, Zee. They buried their mother.” He whispered. It had almost broken Briar too, and maybe it would have if it wasn’t for Art. He found he could not begrudge his small girl some happiness. Young or not.

He listened with rapt, pained attention as she began to describe the night. The dark, the fire, heat, claws. “There was no sign of anybody else. The fire must have covered their tracks. They… they left behind bodies. They must have staged them. Killed a deer, found the pieces they needed… They must have done this. Done this to us. That means… that means you're alive, and you’ve been here, the entire time. Zee. I didn’t save you, I left you here. Six months.” He wanted to kill them again, slowly. He wanted to hear them gasp for breath. They hadn’t deserved the mercy of a quick, dispassionate kill.

"Speech"

Sirius' words crushed her heart, and the ghost of a smile that lingered on her lips faded. They buried their mother, her children could never be innocent to the world again. He was continuing, fabricating a story of coverups for her benefit. Willing her to be alive, dangling before her hope that she refused to grasp at. Who could have done this, pre-planned such an elaborate capture? Why take her? Zee's head shook slightly, though she did not argue with him. Arguing always brought pain, and although Sirius had never intentionally raised his paw to hurt her, she could not rule out this being some cruel trick. Exhaustion began to creep up on her, and she found herself speaking aloud. "Could you find me my coat?" The fluffy, 'winter cheetah' pelt Sirius had gifted her, had made into a plushy-lined armor. The keepsake had been stripped from her not long after she arrived here. Her companions too, she'd seen no sign of, though she assumed they were dead. "I'm tired." There was the risk that once he was out of the door, he'd vanish and the world would reset. The blood would evaporate, her captors return. While she yearned for his company, it would be better to dispel the illusion sooner rather than later... and should he remain, at least she'd be warm. "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

“Yes… yes of course”he said softly, feeling stiff and numb as he pulled himself to his paws. He looked back at Zee then, lying on the floor. Looking small and fragile in a way she never had before. He realised he was afraid to leave her again. If he blinked, or stepped away. If his eyes weren’t trained on her for even a breath, he would lose her again.

It grew in him like a panic attack, and his breathing quickened. He took another step to the door and a feeling like vertigo rushed over him. Or was that blood loss? Perhaps his insanity wasn’t entirely due to his unhinged state… or maybe it was, but there was something else there as well. Some of the blood dripping from his coat was too fresh. He looked to it, then away. His eyes going back to Zee. Couldn’t leave her. Couldn’t walk away. He couldn’t do it. “I… I’m sorry Zee, I can’t” the fool couldn’t fifull even this one request. He sunk back to the floor, pulled himself closer to her. Uncertain if she would pull away. His motions achingly slow and careful, searching for any sign of fear or hurt in her as he moved to slowly wrap a paw about her and pull her close. He could not get her her coat, but he could warm her with his own body.


"Speech"

She could see the titanic wolf struggling with her request, and somehow she knew his fear was the same as her own. Unwilling to risk the illusion dissolving, he returned to her side with only apologies. The disappointment did not last long in her eyes as he moved closer, her sadness erased by alert awareness. Zee watched the muscles beneath his coat as they shifted slowly to bring his paw towards her, smelt the blood staining him grow stronger. Felt his warmth radiate in her direction. She found herself repeating inwardly, Sirius won't hurt me, though the scar on her neck shouted otherwise. To resist him would be as defiant as to argue, and so she forced herself to meet his arms before he could read her hesitance and retreat. His warmth enveloped her instantly, as if she'd dove into one of Resin's hot springs back home. It was familiar, almost safe. Zee's head lowered across one of his limbs, her muzzle craning around him to watch out the doorway. "If they come back when I'm sleeping, you'll kill them again?" She asked him. "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

She allowed him to pull her close. There was a split second where he thought - but no, she came willingly. Her head cradled across his limb. She tilted her head, eyes to the doorway, but the Warlord buried his head into her coat. “Of course. I won't let you go again,” he whispered, voice quivering with too much emotion.

He buried his head in the back of her neck, the intensity of the Warlord vibrating through his veins. But despite it all, despite the deaths he had caused, despite having Zee in his arms. Despite knowing he should not leave his injuries unattended, he could not help himself. He was so tired, and he wanted this dream to go on forever. He held her close, and he closed his eyes. Exhausted to the bone.

"Speech"

The security of being in his arms helped to spread the warmth of tiredness through her body, the adrenaline being chased away by his comforting grip. In mere moments she was nearly asleep, and then his head came down upon her and her body tensed once more. Some selfish part of her wanted to beg him to remain awake, to watch over her. To remain awake so that he might not wake up instead in the real world without her. It was not a fear she could voice aloud, and instead she forced her eyes to shut beneath his weight and let out an exhale. "If this isn't real, tell them I love them, and that I'm sorry." She murmured, her voice thick with sleep. Before she could hear his reply, she'd succumbed to the heavy exhaustion. -exit via sleeps- "Speech"

I don't deserve to have you

“They know,” he whispered “They know.” But her breathing had already evened out, and he knew the sound of her sleep. Despite the exhaustion, he found that he could not sleep with the woman he thought dead in his arms. His eyes trailed down her familiar body, and he was a little ashamed for the lust he felt, watching the rise and fall of her even breathing. She was… damaged, hurt, mentally and physically. Her health and safety were the most important things.

That also meant that he could not sleep, and risk the night terrors. So, instead, he held her sleeping body, feeling the aches and pains of his, which helped a little to wash away the exhaustion threatening to pull him down. It had been a long journey here, and he had not taken much rest during it.

"Speech"