What once was

The boundless energy and enthusiasm little Dusk possessed never failed to bring a beaming smile to her father’s face. He loved watching the way she ran and bounded across the land, exploring every nook and cranny she could get her tiny nose into. While it was often the culprit of many anxious moments for him, it did also remind him of himself when he had been a pup with an insatiable wanderlust. That was why he had taken her beyond pack lands first. His little soot sprite of a daughter made him simultaneously feel so young and so old. Dusk addressed him by the name only she used and it made his smile widen with a chuckle. "Would you like to go on more adventures, little shadow?" asked the proud father. "Well, we might have to have daddy-daughter adventures all the time then!" The alpha was reminded of his own puppyhood adventures with his mother, the two of them roaming to distant lands just for the hell of it. Tamsyn had been the big driving force behind his love of adventuring. He hoped that maybe he could be the same to Dusk.

Once they were in the now unclaimed lands of the once-kingdom of Fenmyre, Dusk declared that there had once been wolves here. A rueful smile touched Artorias’ lips and he nodded solemnly while they wandered through the aspen woods, his smallest daughter darting and weaving between his forelegs like a cat. "That’s right, Dusk. This place was once the kingdom of Fenmyre." Art stood still so Dusk could lean back into his leg, gazing about the empty lands where his friend’s family once lived. Dusk’s innocent question prompted the dire man to look down at her, fiery amber eyes meeting the matching citrine jewels of his daughter. "No, little one, wolves do not disappear into thin air," he explained with a calm solemness in his voice.

Art sank back on his haunches and gingerly looped a forepaw around his small pup. "The wolves that used to live here were good friends of ours. Their alpha, a wolf named Chimera, fell ill some time ago. He took his family and left Auster to find a place where he can recover. Perhaps someday they will come home again." He glanced down to see Dusk rubbing the scabbed wounds on her cheek, and his stern fatherly look crossed his features for a brief moment, though the upset he’d felt when he first found out about his daughter’s unsupervised fight with a crocodilian was mostly fizzled out. "What did we learn from our little misadventure with the caiman?"

"Artorias Carpathius"