Nothing else matters

"Speech"

Gone.
He was beginning to understand. He was a slow learner, just a pup, but he was finally beginning to see the larger image of his life. Everywhere he went, he brought destruction. He tore apart happiness and stability, until there was nothing left. His own mother, brutally beaten to death until the rain ran red with her blood. Her murderer was like the wind, uncatchable, unknowable.

The pup had been taken to the desert by a Lady of the Sands, and then he had left her. Perhaps that decision had in some ways been right. She was not touched by his curse. Ty on the other hand, the man who began to look at him like a son. His pack was destroyed, his Alpha vanished. There was no one to pick up the pieces as the pack fell apart around them.

Did his demon do this, as well? He wasn’t sure he would ever know. The only bright spark in all of this, was that, alone again… truly alone, his mother had returned to him. The shade of her ghost seemed less substantial then ever. A flicker of white in the corner of his eyes, as quiet as a single drop of rain in the sea of a storm.

She was fading, her shade dying as easily as her physical form, and Astraios did not know what to do. He couldn’t be alone again, he could not do this without her. He didn’t know where they went, only that he had to follow the fading, flickering form of his dead mother as she moved across the land. Sometimes he lost sight of her entirely, at others she moved too quickly for the young boy. He ran, a headlong dash, legs crying beneath him, paws hitting the earth hard. He cared nothing for pain and discomfort. He had felt the worst that the world could throw at him. All he needed was her

And then there she was. True, physical, beautiful in her gown of white. She was returned to him in the flesh. He tore across the last space of ground between them, flying to her side like his paws had wings.
“Mum!” His voice, barely used, broke over the word, struggling to form sound after letting himself fall mute for so long.

And then.. And then he would catch the scent of her, see the greenness of her eyes, and he would realize his folly. This wasn’t his mother, this was another white wolf. A stranger. He collapsed on the earth before her, his weak paws giving way, his empty belly with no strength left to provide. Why hadn’t this world taken him yet. Why did he live when all else he loved was gone.