Winter had come and the scarred man had adjusted accordingly. The plain where The Crew had celebrated less than a month ago with perfect strangers was now blanketed in white. The festivities had at least eased his mind considerably and to him, marked the beginning of a new chapter in his life. He patrolled the Steppe, leaving huge pawprints behind in the wrist deep snow and shaking out his long wavy fur as snowflakes piled on his back. He had shared his story of The Great Brown Bastard but had been careful enough to avoid mentioning his life before landing on Boreas. Or he hoped he had anyway. The entire festival was something of a blur and all he could really remember was waking up on a ledge several feet below his den with a very perturbed raccoon locked in his arms and the worst hangover of his life. If he had shared anything, no one had brought it up since, but he had only just recuperated from the festival enough to leave his den today. He wondered if there would be stragglers he would need to chase off and if there were he hoped none of them were as big as the pregnant female he vaguely remembered who seemed to boast about antagonizing Valdis. He was still adjusting really, in Resia he had been one of the largest wolves on the landmass, now he was in a place where pups the size of foxes seemed to pop out fresh from the womb. That reminded him of how Isis used to poke fun at him for his size but he refused to acknowledge it. He had learned that was what worked best.   A great puff of visible air left his maw as he sighed, marking one of the large stones outside of the mysterious stone ring, his ear twitching as he looked at the remains. He wondered if they could use it for hunting, to accumulate a veritable feast once the next festival started. They could run a herd into it and slaughter whatever was too stupid or weak to jump over the eerily precise square bricks that it was made of. He sneezed and shook out his fur. That was dumb, and Artemis had probably already thought of it anyway. "Batter ya keep yer dumb cunt ideas in yer head whar naewan else keen hear them." He father had said. His father may have been a "Right bastard" but that particular pear of wisdom had stuck with him snce his puphood. "Talk" "You" Think

Chaos' long legs gave him a bit of an advantage in the snow as he strode through it, but the constant accumulation was beginning to stymie even his movements elsewhere. Slogging through this much was a chore - having tried to walk around outside the packlands he could be grateful it wasn't as bad here in higher altitudes than it was down there. The Maw was almost pleasant comparatively since the snow didn't tend to accumulate so deeply there, though the little pockets and valleys were pretty much buried in places already. Elk and the like were congregating on the lower slopes to take advantage of the lack of snow, and the arid steppe seemed to be attracting its share as well between the altitude and the general dryness of the steppe grassland keeping too much snow from accumulating so they could still get to the dried grasses beneath.

His route took him near one of the ruins that scattered the steppe, and he spotted Ruthgar staring at them. "Feeling more alive yet, Ruthgar?" he called out in amusement, the cloud of his breath crystallizing the air before him as he huffed out a laugh. He didn't pick up the pace, not wanting to slip and fall ignominiously on his ass if he found a patch of ice, but he did change direction so his path brought him up beside the scarred brown male. The sharp scent of fresh piss marking one of the stones caught his attention, and he lazily added his own mark to it as well for good measure. Might as well.

"So I noticed you've been making friends in the pack," he said casually as he marked the rock. He gave the other man a kind of lopsided grin, a sly glint. "Getting out and about again?"

“Aye.” He responded with a sort of tired amusement as the black male approached him, a small ghost of a smile on his face as the considerably larger male paced up beside him. Chaos was what Isis would have no doubt called “A bad influence”, but what she would or wouldn’t have thought really didn’t matter because after all that bitch had taken his pups and abandoned him. He noted that Chaos was almost an antithesis to Orsus, the man who had made him his beta after a single brief meeting. He supposed there was value in the morals Orsus upheld; to be kind and peaceful and fart rainbows and eat flowers, but that damned man had walked himself off a cliff and into the ocean. He didn’t have to mend his nature for Chaos, and didn’t need to act like a dainty lamb for females, he could return to his old ways as a rouge and to hell with the consequences. "Getting out and about again?" Chaos asked, earning a smirk from the older male. “A’ve ‘ad enouh broodin’.” He said. “Time tae get oof mah duff ‘n rejoin society.” Chaos didn’t seem to mind his accent, which had been something he had come to hope for when interreacting with other wolves. What he had come to dread was the reaction he had received at the Rapids, being written off as some incoherent moron and chased away. Artemis and Valdis had helped his confidence somewhat, even if they didn’t know it. Having the solidarity of being his packmates had made communicating easier and he found that he was able to do more than grunt and mumble when around The Crew. "Talk" "You" Think

Having finished marking the rock, Chaos gave himself a good hard shake from nose to tail, ears flapping against his head as he did. It wasn't that he wasn't listening to the other male, he was just too clearly relaxed to give the impression of listening very hard. If anything he probably gave the impression most saw in him - a lazy, untrustworthy hoodlum who didn't give a fuck. Some of that was true, and some of it wasn't, but truth was that it could be a useful impression to give sometimes. It wasn't such a bad thing to be underestimated in that way. "I haven't really noticed that brooding does any good," he remarked lazily, throwing himself haphazardly onto a large, comfy looking rock. "Wastes your time and doesn't accomplish anything. Who wants to go through their whole short life just sitting around thinking about all the things that make them upset? Either go out and do something about it, or forget about it. Hell. We live and then we die. No reason to make things more complicated than that eh?"

He gave a small grunt in response and yawned. “True.” He said gruffly. If Chaos made a bad impression Ruthgar was worse, between his marred appearance and a disinclination to speak due to his accent it was easy to assume Ruthgar was generally apathetic if not completely cold to those around him. He wanted to believe that his actions would speak louder than his words, but the only positive action he had was his first Coup, and while it was the first Coup in what he hoped would be a long history in Crew it hadn’t entirely gone well. His participation in the pack hunt had been minimal and in his mind he just counted himself lucky that he hadn’t fucked the whole thing up. His participation in the festival was fuzzy after he had told the story of The Great Brown Bastard at the rapids, although he supposed crowing in the first place counted for something.

He looked at Chaos as he reclined on the rock and looked away, his mind elsewhere. He wasn’t sure he was ready to let go of all that he had gone through, between his life in the pack Cerise or his betaship under Orsus, or his relationship with Isis and how it ultimately ended. He wanted to believe that someday he would be able to move past it, but the wounds felt far too fresh for him to even consider moving on now.

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"True" the guy said, and then nothing. Chaos squinted his eyes at the other male, waiting for him to say... well, just about anything really. For the first time in his rather short career as an alpha Chaos found his impatience at odds with his sense of responsibility for the pack. He knew he should make the effort to touch base with each of his wolves and make sure they had what they needed to be happy, make sure they were in peak condition. He'd watched his father do the same, letting them mostly go their own way but keeping an eye on them and checking in on them on an individual basis. He knew it was what an alpha should do and he was happy to do it but... fuck if this guy made that easy on him. His striped tail twitched impatiently against the snowy rock as he begrudgingly took it on himself to shove the deflated conversation back into gear.

He touched his tongue to his heavy incisors, sitting up slightly from his lazy sprawl, and eyed Ruthgar. "So how has Crew been for you? Anything you need? Training or something like that? Fuck knows I'm no scout but if you need me to I can kidnap you a navigator-type or something to train you up."