Silent Prayers

Her paws padded lightly over the soil path, gradated eyes scanning and shifting across the plains as she made her way along the wall, before slipping up a ramp to trot along the top of the stone boundary that blocked the pack-lands from intruders in all but the open areas left to allow prey and wolves to pass by under the careful watch of sentries.

She’d been watching the prey move through, and had noticed that, while they had been initially nervous even when she’d been old enough to observe them without supervision by her father, they had begun to move past without worry, since they hadn’t been harassed by the watchful wolves that could be at the top of the wall at any given hour.

The shimmering white wolf stopped and turned her head to scan slowly over the lands beyond the wall, letting her eyes drift over without focusing too hard on any one point—she knew that any unnatural movements would catch her eye better if she wasn’t focusing intently on things.

All was clear, save for a few deer feeding well out, almost at the edge of her range of sight—she caught the flicker of a white tail flitting at a fly. She thought, perhaps, that it was a doe and her half-grown fawns. Turning, Aurielle leapt lithely from the stone wall, landing with a soft thump of paws and trotting toward the hillock that held the Seat of her family.

But she didn’t go to the ravine that led into the cave and the wide area just outside the cave’s opening, though she paused to utter a short bark of passing greeting down the ravine before her path took her onward to a glade some ways past the heart of the wooded hill’s side.

Her haunches lowered as she came to a stop at the center of the glade, gazing down at the divots filled with pretty stones and grown over with herbs and flowers. Chosen by her great grandmother at the time of Cairo the first’s burial, here at her paws. Erani’s grave – the second she had lain in – lay beside that of the Adravendi patriarch. It had been a wish that couldn’t be fulfilled at the time of her actual death—to rest beside the male who had loved her and guarded her almost ever since she had joined his pack. First as a stranger loves a new friend, and then, at the end, a love realized too late to do more than admit it.

Aurielle’s ears fell back as she wondered absently what it would have been like if things had happened differently then. If there had been more time. Might Gwenevere have actually been blood-family?

The thought of blood family led her mind to her own blood. She knew her parents had wanted to perhaps have at least one more litter, but they were getting to an age where it might be hard to conceive. A brief, wistful smile twitched over her features at the thought of having a bunch of little brothers or sisters – or both – nipping at her hocks and tail-hair.

Maybe… But her mother would have to get out of that shell of fear she’d donned during her ordeal. Both Solveiga and Aramis bore scars that needed to heal.

A long look was cast to the graves at her paws, before her head bowed and she murmured softly, “How do I help them? How can I help them when I’m falling flat just leading the pack?” A hint of self-venom edged into her tone as she hissed the second question.

The pack was quiet, despite her desire to get it truly hopping, and she knew she had Gwen to thank for Celestial not falling into complete shambles. Gwen was juggling motherhood and a pack and still managed to hold herself tall and strong, and here was ‘Rielle, failing at something she’d been trained to do from the start.