The Nature of the Beast (celestial fight training)

He’d been quiet since the birthing. His mother’s last words had been in a moment of clarity, just before he’d left her side to gather the plants he needed to care for Solveiga when she’d called.

Cherish the new lives that come. Let me go.

There was so much clarity and fire in his mother’s sapphire and amethyst eyes that he’d understood the underlying order there. A mother’s order not to fall into the same trap she had. You couldn’t save everyone, not even with the best knowledge available. She had never been able to let go of her perceived failure to save Surreal. He couldn’t hang on to losing her.

So, he’d let her go. He mourned her, and the fact that she couldn’t have gone, surrounded by her mate and children. But he didn’t let himself fall into the pit of self-blame. She’d been ready to go. He’d seen it in her eyes. She’d known, perhaps had remembered fragments of his and Justice’s outpourings – and for a short time Valor's – that Creed was gone, and that Valor was taken from Celestial, and that Fable and Exodus were missing.

He refused to remember her as the skeletal shell she had passed away as, or the grief maddened wolf. Instead, he cast his mind back to the ghostly memories of his childhood, before everything had changed. Her kindness, and the base lessons she had tried to set within her children even then. He remembered the stories of her life growing up and learning, given to him by his aunt and Nomad family. An apt mind, keen for learning, and good humored.

And today it sounded like there was learning to be done. Gwenevere’s call to the pack didn’t fall on deaf ears on his part, and he made his way quickly to the call, though he came in on the tail end of the wolves gathering, by the looks of it. A quick scan of the faces brought a sigh that he quickly repressed in favor of slipping to Justice’s side.

He had seen little of her lately, especially since the passing, and yet he held no ill against her. Everyone mourned and handled things differently. Instead, he pressed into her side, light mingling with shadow as he offered the quiet strength he needed to share, eyes shifting to Gwenevere’s features. He hadn’t had a spar in a while, and he wasn’t one bit against seeing what she might had to teach them. He’d heard that she’d done very well in the raid. Every win on their side had been instrumental to their defeat of Talis’ invaders. If he’d not been busy at the healing camp, he’d have liked to take a chunk out of a few of them, himself.