lost

He was a year old.

He supposed he should be happy about that, because it meant that Leto stopped treating him as much like a baby and was starting to actually teach him how to make the snares and other traps she used, instead of just hunting. She hadn't trusted him with making them before, when he was a pup, because - as she told him a million times - she wasn't going to let some scatterbrained, no-attention-span puppy make the traps that could be the difference between a meal and starvation. He'd never been scatterbrained, and he had always had what would be a great attention span even for an adult, but it was ingrained in her to view pups as walking disasters.

He wasn't a pup anymore though, and he'd had months of observing her make the snares and traps even though he'd never been able to try, so once she started teaching him he picked it up quickly. For the first time, she was giving him cautious praise, instead of treating him like an annoyance. It was a huge difference to the attention-starved young male, but he craved more than that.

He was lonely.

He knew he had a lot more family out there, somewhere. Leto had told him about his aunts, Artemis and Iskra, and about how Artemis had had pups a few months before he was born. And of course Lyra and Ares were out there somewhere, with Chaos. He wanted to find them and see them again, but he wasn't sure he could find the mountain again and he knew Leto wouldn't help him. Still, he had to try, and she didn't try to stop him when he set off for the southlands. In fact, she had told him that since he was an adult now, she was going to start making her way back down to Auster. She'd always been more comfortable there - the only reason she'd stayed in the north was in the hopes of finding Artemis or her children again, but she'd given up on that.

Aquila puffed out a breath. He was definitely getting tired and felt like he'd gotten turned around somewhere. Maybe it was time to stop and set up his snares. He'd need to stay around a few days for them to really be effective, but he needed the break from travelling anyway while he regrouped and figured out where he was.

The brightly colored yearling surveyed the land around him, then flopped down in the shade of some big metal thing with a stiff metal tail sticking out of it. He couldn't help but wonder what the strange, half-buried object had been, and wonder even more about the long-dead legendary creatures that had made it.