Tornach stiffened at his cousin's words and jerked away from his attempt at soothing him. Do not hush me, cousin, he wanted to snarl, he wanted so badly to snarl, but manners were so deeply ingrained in him that he could not give into the passionate anger that wanted to free itself in hot words. "You could have stopped this before it began," he accused tightly, his voice coming out in a half-strangled, wooden tone. "You would not allow a pup to jump into a raging river because it is incapable of deciding for itself what it should do, so why would you allow someone who is clearly incapable of making rational decisions for herself to fight someone to the death? You have killed her, sir, you and everyone else here who sat back and watched while she called for him."
He trembled beneath a righteous fury, barely stopping his face from twitching into a snarl, barely kept his face smooth and fangs covered. Even the best of his control could not help stop the deliberately hurtful words that slipped from him at the end. He had always believed he could trust adults to always do the right thing but twice now in his young life that belief had been badly shaken, and by his own family. He wanted to throw himself forward and knock the two combatants apart, both to protect his cousin from the fangs of her enemy and to pin her down and keep her from fighting, but now in his heart he was convinced that the adults would stop him - clearly they were invested in allowing this fight to happen, and clearly had no interest in actually stopping it. Tears of hurt, of anger and frustration, pricked hotly at his eyes, and he spun away from his family and the gawking pitying gazes of the wolves who came to watch. Were he any less the wolf he was, he might have thrown himself at the pale, speckled female who'd spoken so mockingly in answer to his pained question and given her a taste of what she was so eager for his cousin to go through but he clamped down on his own anger and turned away.
His eyes lit on Enigma, the wolf he had defied his mother to save, rushing forward to snarl and threaten some bystander who'd had nothing to do with this, and a cool sort of numbness spread over Tor from head to toes like a bucket of water running down him. Why? Why was everything in his life so intent on coming back to hurt him? Had he saved this wolf only for him to go cause more suffering in the world? Saved him only for him to die anyway in another foolish quarrel? Well he would not stand back and gawk while Enigma made a stupid mistake, not like his family did.
Bounding forward, trying to blink away that hot feeling behind his eyes, he skidded in between Enigma and the girl, and the boy from her pack that had stepped up ready to fight. "Stop it," he barked, "all of you! Hasn't there already been enough violence? Enough pain? When will there be enough to satisfy you?" Though he was clearly younger than all the would-be combatants, he was taller and already heavier than all three, and he glared down at all of them with crackling fur and sharp blue eyes with equal disappointment and anger directed toward all three of them. Was the world always this... dark, and he'd just been too young and too sheltered to notice? Or had the forced relocation of his family been just the first signs of a world going mad around him?
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