Back when days were simple

He’d been keeping to himself since the Challenge. He patrolled, certainly, making sure the borders were well doused, and he’d even begun scouting out likely stones to carry to the borders to help loners identify borders. When he wasn’t patrolling, he was curled near his father, or on his mother and grandmother’s gravesides. Solveiga had wandered again, and he couldn’t help but admit that he missed the gentle little healer’s presence.

This day, he was in his alcove, drowsing. He was healed, by now. There was a slight limp in his gaits, but he could move without pain, and only a mild stiffness in the mornings. He’d needed the time to grieve, before he could face the rest of the pack, and get the activity going again. It had been silent. Kavdaya had been deep in a depression, grieving both for the failure of saving Surreal, and for the loss of her cousin. He understood her distance.

He may have lost a mother, but she had the guilt over her shoulders; the irrational guilt of what if. What if she had caught the seriousness of Surreal’s illness sooner, instead of writing it off as a serious, stubborn cold? What if she lost more wolves? His grandmother, Erani, had told the tale of Valhalla, or Starlite, as it had been called at the time, and the death of Cairo’s Queen, Guinevere. She had told them all that the guilt of losing someone so dear, of having not caught the illness in time. How it had eaten away at her heart, and how Cairo’s giving her his motherless children to watch over, originally for a little while, but eventually to raise as a surrogate mother, had saved her.

He knew his father suffocated under the grief, and guilt. And when he felt the sinking sensation, and lifted his head from his paws, ears pricked, he knew. He rose quickly, circling around the wall of the alcoves, peering into the alcove his mother and father had shared. The blind male was still, barely breathing. Just enough time left to revive him, but… Regulus shook his head. Falk was suffering, at this point. His children were all grown. His beloved was dead. He had lived long, and it would be cruel to keep him alive when he was so deeply unhappy in life.

Regfulus padded quietly into the alcove, his father’s breaths echoing even more softly in his ears as he went, and curled beside his sire, setting his head over his shoulders. “Sleep well, Father. It’s time you joined her.” The whisper was thickly spoken to the air, as the silence enveloped them both. But he was certain that somewhere in the other realms, his mother waited, whole and healthy, for her love.