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He was getting to be an old man, slowly creeping up to his eighth year. Bones and joints were beginning to feel stiff in the mornings, and the rich stony slate of his face was colored with light grey and white. He was getting washed out and he knew this. He knew that he had been washed out for some time now. Perhaps he had been washed out all along, at least he had always just been getting washed along. From birth he had never been stable, never quite as sturdy or stationary as he should have been. Born in Clouded Tears, thrown to Storm, swept up by Azathoth—his whole childhood was a torrent of change. Never had any of the packs kept him close and he had become nomadic, letting the tides take him where they would. Eventually they took him to Lyla.
It had been in his second year he met her and mated her--the lovely lady who in a twisted way reminded him of his mother so. Not so small, but shock white with arctic eyes, he couldn’t keep away from the snow lady. In his third she had bore him children and it wasn't even in his fourth that he lost her. Even she could not be stable, could not resist the never ending waves that crashed against him and threw them where they would. With her he had taken their two sons, reincarnations of his father and brother and left only little Cercelee. Named for her great grandmother, reminiscent of her grandmother and mother, Adrastos Morpheus had had no use for the child.
Clouded Tears had stayed, barely changed. Those the ghosts that haunted the territory were different it was all the same. Loss and loneliness and nothing more. His parents were dead, his siblings scattered and only a dutiful cousin to take in his anything-but-wayward ward. Laruku had accepted the charge as he accepted all others—a sad look and a shake of the head to the dead bead father who left her there. Those who came from Sadira blood eventually turned up now and then, passed through, maybe left a part of themselves. Adrastos left Cercelee and he hadn't once regretted the choice.
Lyla was the only face who haunted him, and it mattered not that her fury would know no bounds at his betrayal of his only living child. The enormous man was only a shell, nothing filled his great body but the usual organs and bones required for any mammal. Life had little meaning, nothing more than eat, sleep and shit every now and then. It was how he passed his fourth year, his fifth, and even his sixth. What events transpired then, or what souls he met, he did not remember, and they did not matter. Less and less he thought of Lyla, and even less he thought of Tuki, or Lisi, or Cer. He didn't even think of himself much, existing almost as an entity outside of himself.
In his seventh year he learned of Aiji's death, many years before and he found it impossible to grieve a dead sister so long lost. The child that spoke to him of the raven sibling bore the surname of de Sadira, though he couldn't recall her first name. It did not matter what his great niece was named, for she passed through and on out of his life as all the others had. That Aiji was gone did not surprise him, for surely Lisichka, Iskata and Laika had suffered similar fates, and even if it weren't true Adrastos fancied himself the last of that litter. Even if they lived somewhere, they were dead to him, and so he was the only one who had made it to seven.
After his encounter with the de Sadira girl he had not expected to see any other ghosts. Surely she would be the last reminder of a life he hadn’t lived in well over six years. That however was not how life worked and whether some divine force had brought the girl into his path, or it was purely coincidental Adrastos could not know. Yet she was there and the man could think of nothing suitable to say as he stared into what could be the face of his only daughter.