midnight train going anywhere

Gwenevere listened quietly, reserving judgement. Not that she had any reason to doubt Brandr, who seemed to be an earnest young man and had likely only told her the truth, but sometimes what one person thought was the truth was only one side of a very complicated issue, and she wasn't going to go into this carrying an obvious bias and put Celestial at risk for it. It was a large part of the reason she had elected to come here herself rather than waiting and seeing if Aurielle would prefer she did it herself. The young tended to see things very black and white, and despite how much Aurielle prided herself on her maturity she was still hardly more than a child. Yes, she thought as Malleus spoke on, she stood by her decision. She couldn't imagine Aurielle would have been willing to think past the 'big evil wolf doing evil things' even for the good of the pack. She had a lot of her father's biases and Gwen doubted either of them would ever admit it to themselves.

As Malleus wound down, Gwen narrowed her blue eyes in obvious contemplation, leaving a silence to hang between them, a silence she was comfortable with but many others perhaps wouldn't be. Finally she blinked her eyes back to Malleus' gaze. "The alpha of Dragoste requested the pack challenge end in the death of one of the participants?" There wasn't disbelief in her tone, but rather the desire to absolutely clear on the details. If that was true, she couldn't fault Malleus' father for his actions. Mercy, in that case, would certainly have simply left an enemy at their back who had a very personal reason to want the Abraxas wiped out. On the other hand... "It seems rather unfortunate to risk reprisals from his family," she observed aloud, tilting her head slightly as she watched him. She wasn't particularly familiar with the late alpha to begin with, so perhaps he hadn't had family he was close to, but experience told her that was a fairly rare occurrence in a pack species. She gave a gentle shrug and moved on regardless of his answer.

"I understand several of your family engaged in a raid on Dragoste while the alpha was occupied with the challenge and took captives and maimed others. Is this true?" It had seemed like overkill when Brandr had told her of this - why raid the pack when it would be the new alpha's to do with as he pleased once he won the fight anyway? He could very well have chosen to keep the entire pack captive if he'd chosen, so why would he have loosed his wolves on the unsuspecting pack while he'd been fighting for the right to the pack already? If she had to guess she'd think it had been intended as a brutal scare tactic, hoping to garner a reputation that would have the other packs keeping their heads down to avoid notice.