It had been four days since Finn joined Anathema, and already she was out a’roaming once more. Chalk it up as an old habit. Though Finn felt the slight kindlings of happiness at having found a more permanent home than all her previous attempts, she had spent all her life wandering. It was hard to deny her feet what they were so accustomed to. And thus here she was, edging along the ice-locked coast of Aelcrest, eyeing the seals as they moved in their peculiar caterpillar gait across the beach. Such strange animals. Incredibly ungainly on land, yet graceful as ravens in flight underwater. Finn had seen them, long, long ago when she lived in British Columbia. From the cliffs, during the one summer she experienced there, she stared out into the clear, blue water with her brothers, and watched the seals dance.
Brom’s smiling face swam before her eyes, and Finn cringed at the sight of her sibling. He had been laughing then, and even Aegnus had smiled. This was before the latter killed the former, before Finn was chased from her father’s territory like a mangy coyote. At the time she never would have thought it possible for so much heartache to be waiting just around the bend. She was older now, and wiser. Perhaps more jaded too, though somehow the cruelties of the world had managed to also whet her appetite for kindness.
Finn shrugged her thin shoulders, feeling the absence of her almost constant companion quite keenly. Alastair had vanished from the woods outside of the caves of Anathema, and Finn had spent no great amount of time looking for him. Secretly, he hoped he had run into a pretty doe and they were spending their time in whatever strange form of courtship deer undertook. Though to most wolves her companion would be prey, to Finn he was perhaps the closest thing to a friend she had. She smiled bitterly, wondering if Alastair felt that she herself needed to get it over with and find a nice young wolf to settle down with.
Abandoning her morbid musings, Finn broke into a steady run that took her down towards the scrubby grass bordering the beach. Hunger coiled through her belly, and she hoped to dispel it with a quick meal of rabbit, or perhaps gull. The seals would be far too hard to catch, and Finn felt strangely ashamed at the thought of all those expressive eyes turned upon her as she feasted on one of their own. She moved with ease, even in the snapping cold, even in hunger, even after her journey from Anathema. In fact, these days, Finn had never felt so alive.
For once she was accepted, for once she was actually speaking with other wolves, instead of being attacked or driven away, and it was nice. She had not realized how much she missed a friendly tone of voice, or casual conversation about the weather. And though the sight of so many luperci sent her heart racing in trepidation, it seemed that familiarity bred contempt, and her fear for the mutations was lessening each day. She still didn’t exactly like them, but she had realized, speaking with Naniko, that they were all still wolves. Wolves in strange, unnatural, two-legged bodies, but wolves all the same.
Reaching the grass, Finn dipped fluidly into a crouch and fell still, standing like a particularly battered statue amongst the turf. The dune grass reached past her shoulders, and with the gloom of the weather she became just another shadow, rippling across the ground with the movement of the wind. It was so easy to fall into this state, this zen-like concentration. Her pale blue eyes, like chips of ice, focused on a nesting gull. The pupils widened, till her eyes were all but dark. Her breath stilled, becoming no more than a whisper, her muscles tensed, tensed, tensed. And then she sprang, falling upon the gull in a sudden burst of feathers and a spatter of blood across the earth.