He'd been doing a lot of thinking lately, and with the advent of winter came and went his birthday. He was a year old now, old enough to be allowed to make decisions for himself, old enough to decide if he wanted to stay in Imperium or leave. His frustration this fall must have been contagious, because his sisters had been making themselves awful scarce as well. It worried him not to see them all the time - what if they'd died? Would he ever know what happened if they just disappeared forever? He'd been doing a lot of introspective thinking too, about his dad, and slowly piecing together a history of his family as best as he could. The stories that he and his sisters had always told themselves, the vague memories of the time before the demon bear took Roman's life, his conviction that his father was somehow more than a normal wolf had solidified into a clear, obsessive belief. A belief he'd been brooding on more and more.
His day today was spent up an apple tree - an easy enough climb, since all he had to do was scramble up onto a mostly-rotted fence to a low-hanging branch and then scramble up it to a thicker one to lay down on. He liked the different perspective it gave him. It was a good chance to see everything from a new angle and in the process change his angle of thinking too. Though today he was mostly just being lazy, his fluffy tail and all four paws hanging down on either side of the branch he straddled as he drowsed safely up out of the cold wet snow.
