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He listened with interest as she explained her reasons for not being a good fighter, nodding slowly. Then he spoke, voice reasonable, “Well… Look at it this way. Your patient could be helpless, and their life may depend on you holding off an attacker long enough for help to arrive. And what would you do if you were the only wolf between your newborn pups and someone who wanted to hurt them?” Food for thought, and hopefully something that might help her find some use for keeping her skills marginally honed. He would have to kill whomever hurt her, he thought, if the event ever arose. The same for all of his pack.

“The rule for healers needing to learn how to fight comes from my grandmother. When she was Lead Healer of Valhalla, years and years ago, one of her fellow healers was attacked by a loner. If Grandmother and her brother hadn’t come in time, with the help of Obsidian, a horse that befriended my great uncle, Rayne could have been raped and killed. Even so, eventually, she wandered too far, and the same wolf got her in the end. They only ever found pieces of her.” His tongue lashed out of his maw, an expression of distaste and sadness coloring his bright visage before he turned to brighter subjects.

He could tell that the scents were a bit strong for her, judging by a slight change in breathing, and offered a solution, “Small sniffs might help, and blowing the air out after each one. “ To her question regarding his and his younger sister’s coloring, he nodded with a chuckle. “Really. My grandmother said I’m a throwback to her grandmother. Apparently I look just like Briena, if larger and male.”
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Her compliment to the territory brought a bigger grin, his tail sweeping the ground before he rose to his paws once more and gestured with a paw. “Well, there’s certainly more to see.” He stated cheerfully, before he led her through the plains to a small grove of trees, at the center of which lay a depression, overgrown with various different herbs, most dormant at this time of year.

“This is the resting place of Valhalla’s founder, and the Patriarch of the Adravendis; Cairo Adravendi. I never met him, but mother did. He was my height, brown, and had blue eyes. My grandmother had nothing but good to say of him. He’s where we get the Adravdendi name from. We aren’t related by blood, but through adoption; my grandmother was given his children to raise when his last mate died of an illness. They are, and were, Chrysanthe, Epiphron, Syrinx, Eos, and his two adopted sons Preston and Neo. Pip’s the only one left. She’s in the pack called Fiori in the east, and is the mother of their King, Leo. Mother’s never once seen her and Chrysanthe as being anything other than older sisters. Syrinx and Eos… Well, they rarely hung around much; they had children together, too. Syrinx was supposed to inherit Valhalla, but vanished. There’s truly a lot of history soaked into these lands.” He grinned at the little tan healer. “I could go on for hours, by memory of what my grandmother and mother taught me, and still not be done with the story.”

That reminded him that he ought to sit in on his mother’s next history lesson with the kids. He could tell it just as well, but there was something about hearing it from someone who had been there. When his mother spoke of fighting in the Siege of Valhalla and Glaciem, there was a distant look in her eyes, like she was reliving the fight, and the chaos all around her. When his grandmother had told them in detail of all that she had experienced, there was that same look of remembering, and you knew that she was seeing it all again; her own mother and father working in the healer’s trunk of an ancient redwood that had grown or fallen sideways and continued to live. The devastation of the Blackmoon Pack’s attack, and the aftermath… And he wished he could see that face again. Perhaps someday in a dream.