Vesper tried to pretend that she did not care. She presented herself to the world as an aloof individual with a stake only in what was immediate, what was intimately hers—but all of it was a carefully crafted lie to keep her weaknesses at bay. The truth of the matter was that the coywolf did care, and her speech to the white wolf bordered on manic, smoothed over by cool tones but vibrating with the passion erupting in her chest. She hated the prejudice and the hate with a dangerous chaos, a chaos barely directed to her cause. At her heart a wannabe revolutionary, the yet-young hybrid wanted to be able to pretend she’d done any good before she died. Even if she managed to bring about the opinion of one hateful wolf, one wolf who curled his lips at her species without stopping to understand, she would feel accomplished.
It was all pathetic and sad, really, and she knew she would hate herself for all of this emotion in the morning.
And then the impossible happened—the half-blind wolf shot a smile her way, a smile devoid of the acidity she’d been expecting. She shifted her paws slightly, the only sign of awkwardness after her calm rebuttal, then turned her good ear forward when the older male began to speak, apologizing, and apologizing again on behalf of “his kind.” Those words made her look at the ground for the briefest of moments, wondering why he felt entitled again, but she didn’t reject the apology.
The tawny female nodded when he gave his name. “Vesper,” she responded with a light nod of acknowledgment. A half-smirk tugged at her lips when he mentioned New Dawn, confirming what she had suspected, but it was a weary one. She shook her head at the last apology and stifled a sigh. “I forgive you,” she stated, and wondered just how much of that was true and how much she trusted him to be ashamed. He’d sounded quite passionate, and while she felt her return argument was logical, she knew it wouldn’t dispel the aggression of a likewise heated wolf. “I understand that the skulls—that the skulls can easily bear the wrong message, for those who want to see it. What we see as a warning more violent wolves see as a threat, and the cycle is never-ending.” In truth, the skulls made her uncomfortable just because of how much trouble was generated from their existence—but she couldn’t imagine taking something like that away from the clan. Like their wars, the skulls were Inferni’s history, and rooted too deeply in Inferni’s culture to ever change that.
Vesper shifted her paws a final time and decided that, if Shandom would be civil and stick around after their verbal scuffle, she might as well lighten the mood with less serious talk. “How are Zalen and his mate doing?” she asked, and added despite herself, “And Kiara and her daughter, too, if you know them?”
Word Count → 500