i may not follow, i may not lead, just walk beside me

Mercury began by describing his parents' pack. Avantika let his voice act as a narrator, imagining a happy family much like the Hallows, a sweeping ocean, a busy port. Dread rose in her stomach for him. Something bad had happened to them. That was why he was here, why he had left. He confirmed it after a pause. A volcano. Avantika didn't really know what that was, but its eruption was bad enough to smother his home and kill his whole family pack. She couldn't imagine what that must have been like. Being away, coming back to find everyone she knew dead. It was the worst thing possible.

He finished by declaring his loyalty to the Hallows, saying that they would not vanish so easily. "It won't," Avantika promised, quietly and full of surety. "We won't let it." I won't let it. Her mouth kept moving, forming words before she even realized what was happening. "I wouldn't be alive without the founder of the Hallows. My mother, Resin. She... She took me in when my biological parents abandoned me on the border of Hallows' land, six months old and..." and tiny, and useless, and terrified, were the words she couldn't say. "The day she told me that I could stay was the happiest day of my life. I vowed that day that someday I would make it up to the pack, to my new family. That I would die for them if they needed me to." She stood silently then, suddenly very self-conscious and not looking at Mercury. She'd never said so much to anyone other than Art, recently at least. It pleased her, the idea that the newer wolves and pups of the Hallows didn't know that she wasn't born here. That she wasn't biologically a Carpathius. But for some reason, she trusted Mercury.

"Speech"