WC 545
She had been restless all night and even when she bothered to lay in bed the young white wolf could not convince her eyes to close long enough to doze even for a few minutes. She was so excited, and her excitement, as it usually did, brimmed into her every gesture and word the day before. She had spent that day avoiding her brother, Niro, which was a bit uncommon for her. Despite wanting to go to him and chatter about how thrilled she was for tomorrow, and how important that day was for them, she resisted. She pretended to stick to her reading, which was not an uncommon venture for her. In fact, despite how happy she was to have made it to Cour des Miracles and be accepted into the pack, the girl had spent much of her time strangely secluded. It was not that she was unfriendly to strangers, she just had a strange affinity for what they wrote rather than what they said.
So under the guise of another particularly antisocial day, Orin kept secreted away from her brother as she awaited the long hours of morning to pass into noon, and noon to evening, and evening to night, and then it would seem midnight would take forever to come! Midnight... a peculiar time of the night that was always so important. In her world, midnight meant great deadlines, and the hour spells were to be cast, and a mysterious time when the creatures of nightmares snuck into your room. It was a fantastical thing, and many nights she stayed up late, Orin wondered if there was such a thing as “absolute midnight” and if these spells had to be cast and deadlines had to be met at that second, or if there was a give of a few minutes.
Sitting on the edge of her bed with her feet slung over, swinging back and forth like a pup’s (for she was too short for them to reach the floor), she rested her chin on her hands while she pondered this, until finally her honey-coloured eyes wandered to the old, reconstructed wind-up clock she had salvaged and she gasped. Well, if there was an “absolute midnight,” she missed it!
Suddenly she leaped from her perch, grabbed a couple items from her writing desk, and slipped out into the hall. Despite her waxing exhilaration, she managed to creep the few feet through the hall in a near dead silence; a task it seemed she would master with a little practice, thanks to her small size. Quietly, she crept up to the door next to hers, careful to step around the creaky old floorboard, and pressed her ear against the door until she was certain the occupant was inside. A grin she couldn’t corral pulled at her muzzle.
KA-BAM!!! The door slammed against the wall as she threw it open and burst into the room yelling and bouncing. She was a streak of pink and white until she was on the bed, jumping up and down on the mattress, and throwing fistfuls of confetti into the air. Her other hand clenched a plate with an iced cake, and a tiny bag was tied to her arm.
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY BROTHER!!!”