death is like a one way ticket to a distant star

There was no way Kuroki was going on an adventure without her. Ignoring the cold and the pack borders, she stalked her larger brother, even as he in turn stalked their father. Hattori inevitably led them on a merry chase through open icy fields, and and down to the rocky fjord that bordered the ocean inlet. The cold had made her paw pads numb, and her nose was sniffling. She was regretting leaving the pack lands, where she could have crawled into a warm den or found Takē to bury her numb nose into.

Her sniffling was distracting her, and she lost sight of her brother for a moment. With a muffled cry of alarm she picked up the pace, running across the snow until he was back in her line of sight. However, he was not alone. There was a wolf lying in the snow beside her brother, and a mess of red all around. It was like when she got a little overzealous ripping into one of the dead prey her parents occasionally brought them. Gore splattered everywhere. Of course, in those instances, the creature was very much dead.

She had never seen a dead wolf before, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. Wolves weren’t supposed to be dead, that wasn’t how the world worked, right? With great caution and trepidation she inched closer to her brother, holding back little noises of stress as she pressed herself into Kuroki’s side. Searching both for warmth and comfort, before she leaned over the larger brother to look at the wolf.

She had started to take healing lessons from Baba Kiyo, though she was wholly unprepared for what lay ahead of them. First, she started to search for his pulse. With her numb paws and the pounding in her ears she missed it the first two times she desperately sought it. On the third go she felt the thready, weak pulse. “He’s still alive” she whispered to her brother, even as she picked some wounds herself to attempt to cover. “I need something to bind them! He’s losing too much blood”

Speech