"Stephen! I thought you were deead!"

He couldn’t help but join Sephiran in the outburst of laughter. As he was ensured that it ’wasn’t the first time, and wouldn’t be the last’, a momentary smirk cracked his features as he nodded along in acknowledgment.

Of course, the first thing that would come up at the mention of meeting a relative would be status. They didn’t fight, but they didn’t have to. “Yeah, but he didn’t have a chance.” Aresenn answered curtly. While Vulcan was much older, his brother hadn’t given him the impression that he had spent much of his life training. To be fair, Aresenn hadn’t been much better off, but at least he could generally hold his own. That wasn’t the interesting part though. “He said my dad was previously a ruler of a pack that had claimed territory not far from here. It had been made mostly relatives- Praetors mainly, but others as well.” The Praetor boy began, thinking of the sparse pines in a different light as he had come in on. “It was called Incendium, I guess. But it sounded a lot better than these idiot pirates.  Ranks weren’t handed out, they were earned through battle. Loners that got too close to the border were either taken hostage or killed. Deserters were hunted down. And if you didn’t pull your own weight, you didn’t last from the sound of it.” Aresenn said, with a fire flickering behind his amber gaze, but it quickly hardened as he continued on with his next thought. “The point is, they weren’t nearly as soft as where we are at now- which disappoints me why my dad has fallen into their ranks if he could lead a group like Incendium.” That was the real question. He had no idea how the Praetor pack had ended, it didn’t come up in his encounter with Vulcan. But why his father never fought to reclaim it, he would never understand.

Aresenn looked away for a moment as the thoughts churned in his mind. Returning his attention to Sephiran, he continued. “I’m thinking about confronting him on it …” Though he wasn’t entirely sure how that conversation would go. He wondered what the other boy would do had he been the one in this position. “Would you?” He asked thoughtfully, wondering what the answer would be.

"Aresenn Praetor"