When Seconds Tick By

The air around the pack seemed to reek of a new tension as autumn began to close its grip on the north. Gryphon had begun to realize uneasily that his family's scents were dwindling in pack lands. He couldn't remember the last time he'd scented Kharnage, let alone seen him, and Lykos hadn't once tried to seek out his company since the fight training they'd both attended. Even Dragon had seemed to disappear lately. If it had been just Kharnage he might not have worried, since his brother had been distinctly antisocial for about as long as they'd been in Ivalice. But he'd thought that he and Lykos were on pretty good terms, at least, and he was wary of the silence from that quarter. And on top of that, Gryphon had come across the old scents of his mother and an intruder late last season, and blood, but the trespasser had been sent back across the border so he'd thought little of it. He'd worried about his mother, of course, since there seemed to be a lot more of her blood than he was comfortable with seeing splashed across the pine litter of their border, but she'd seemed to get back to doing her usual thing before he'd had time to get really worried.

It didn't take a genius to see that there was more to this family rift than his mother's poor choice in mates. He'd been distracted by training with Esarosa until she'd given birth to her litter, hunting on his own and patrolling the borders to make up for the large amount of pups the pack had acquired - it boggled the mind how quickly the pack had filled up just with pups - but he wasn't an idiot. He knew there was something unpleasant lurking in this apparent calm. He'd been wary of addressing it though, knowing that as a yearling no one in Ivalice saw him as anything more than a rather large child. But now... with autumn storms racking the northern continent, he had reached the age of his majority. He was an adult in the eyes of the world. Would his mother see it that way? He'd not know unless he took the first step.

First, perhaps to procrastinate, he'd ambushed a snowshoe hare when the big lagomorph was dashing through one of the hare-traces that crisscrossed the pines, then with the hare dangling from his jaws he'd set out to find the freshest trail of his mother. It led him to the sight of his mother pacing back and forth along the border in obvious agitation. Gryphon paused a moment to watch her before stepping out of the pines to offer her the prey he laid on the ground between them. "Mom, what's wrong?" he asked immediately as the hare left his mouth. His earthy-brown face wrinkled in concern for her, black ears flicking down. His own reasons for seeking her out weren't forgotten, merely set aside in light of what was clearly a more urgent worry on his mother's part. "Are you ok?"