till death do us part

"Speech"

The cold ran through his veins, matching the cold, empty feeling in his heart, and the ache in his lungs. There was a dampness in his coat where his body temperature had melted some of the white substance that clung to him. He knew there should be a part of him that was weary of pain, and what it could mean. Death didn’t scare him, not like it should. He had sought out pain too much in his past to find anything but a dull comfort at its presence. There was something fundamentally wrong about him, broken. He didn’t respond like any normal wolf should.

He looked at her with a soft, dull expression, hiding a deeper intelligence beneath. This wolf before him was Ruina, he knew that much, and little else. He had never seen her before, nor heard many names of the members of this pack. He had none to match her to, and she offered him none now. Only scorn in her tones as she berated him for his actions. The faint itch of a smile could possibly be made out in the corner of his muzzle. Or perhaps it was a twitch from the cold, it was hard to tell.

Lying in the cold seemed perfectly reasonable to Astraios. Pain had brought about the shade of his mother in his past, and here and now when he seemed so distant, so many world away from her, he had hoped to open a link between them. Instead, there was nothing. Still, the pain could only tame his body, teach him a lesson. Isn’t that what everything in life was for? Losing his mother, finding Ty, ending up here. It was all a lesson of some sought, whether he wanted it or not.

His lips parted softly, through he was still reluctant to speak. The steps he had taken to welcome back the ghost of his mother would be shattered if words escaped him. Silence, pain, dark and quiet. These where the places he found her most easily. A soft sigh escaped his lips, and he raised his eyes to the womans before her, openly looking at the stranger who spoke to him.