Death comes to us all...

Rai had fallen into a sick silence since the brutal death of his mother, and the ending of life as he knew it. The beauty that had taken him in, with her blue-grey eyes and strange mannerisms was a mystery to him. She spoke occasionally in a tongue that held no meaning to him, but the quickly spoken words rolled like jewels from her tawny lips. Travelling by night was unusual to him, and the harsh, hot sands beneath his paws left grit in every crevasse until he wondered if his paws would rub raw and bloody. He didn’t speak, even when his stride took on an uneven gait, forcing his smaller body to keep up with the woman who sheltered, fed, and owned him.

She reached the top of yet another dune before he did, and her sharp eyes glanced back to him, and he met her gaze, unabashed, and perhaps a little vaguely. His tongue was beginning to feel like grit, and his unused vocal cords thirsted from the long walk, and the heat that swayed up towards him from the shifting sands.

There it was again, that strange, exotic tongue that seemed to roll with greater ease from her maw then the language he knew. It had taken him time to understand that she often followed these announcements with words in his tongue, her heavy accent had confused him, but the more he heard her speak it, the more he understood the words beneath. He gave no reply to her urging, but obediently picked up his flagging pace.

He refused to give in to the urge to hang his head low, lifting it higher in defiance to his aching limbs. It was through this action that he saw the shape of a stranger, standing casually and observantly on a ridge not too far from their own. He almost stilled at the darker colors he saw in this wolf first, memories of another, cruler side plagued him, and the scent of blood suddenly filled his nose and mouth. The waking memory did not last long, blown apart by the clear, whiter markings that hugged the lower half of this wolf’s body. He was not the terror that plagued this wolfs waking and sleeping worlds. He turned his head from the stranger without hesitation, his stride lengthening to cover the gap between himself and his savior.