Graceful Rooms of Alabaster Stone

. . .



At the mere mention of the word 'Glaciem', a change came over the boy. There was a faint spark of recognition and then pain, but it quickly muddled into a muted color of anger. He was controlled enough to show only the fainted gleam of fang - but his muzzle knotted up in the clear signs of a snarl. Glaciem. Whoever this wolf was, he wasn't fit to speak the word. Cross had been young when the change had come to his life and his uncle had been defeated in the challenge. But it hadn't really sunk in. His world had already been turned upside down before that point and it was hard to see anything as bad enough to be called 'unexpected'. At the time he had just been happy to have all his family still alive and together. That was all that had mattered. But growing up fast meant he saw the world in all it's shades of grey. He knew now, that though the immediates of his family were fine and dandy - their kingdom was gone. So many had left and dispersed after loosing Glaciem and then leaving Mt. Volkan. Nameless and homeless they had wandered.

All because of the heartless ambitions of the sort of entitled, indulgent creatures who weren't fit to be called wolves. It was enough to make any blood boil - but Cross, in all his calm, quiet, sedate seasons was yet to awaken the true kill-ready warrior that was his inheritance. Nor would it awaken today; for it was then...

...then that he remembered what his mother had said at the meeting with the usurpers... It was only an empty title. Trappings. They had no real pocession of what Glaciem was. Just the were collected of noises that made up it's name. The boy was still obviously agitated, but youth or not, he had the control to smooth the lines of his grimace and observe once more with eyes of clear cut emerald. If the strangers father was the so called 'King', then that meant, standing before Cross was a picture of what he might have been. A rival in flesh and blood. Whether or not he felt the sting of an unfair fate, he had to find the chance meeting intriguing at the least.

His eyes narrowed though, not in anger anymore, but in cold confusion. "You do not look like the bare-jawed one," he murmured steadily enough. "The last one to call himself 'king' near these parts was a brown wolf born out of the Valhallan Pack. Who is your father then?" He pointed ignored the other question that had been given it. It paled in importance to these matters. Besides, he had been the one doing the answering before. Time for a little in return.




. . .