Word Count :: 553 I'm sorry I am a liar. ;___; <3
She should have known better than to leave then. Kaena had been ancient at the time, and the journey had nearly killed her twice over -- by all rights, she should have been a pile of bones in some distant forest. Old as she was, the woman who departed Inferni had been a desperate thing, all former glory fading with physical strength and ability. Still driven by vengeance, the silver-hued hybrid had tried to pin her departure on those reasons and many others, and had successfully done so before.
Such reasons were less than flimsy in the face of what she had left behind. There was little on his face, and yet it spoke of all the time and distance stretched between them and the pitiably brief time they had actually known one another. He was difficult to look at, but even as he burned whatever shreds of hope left in her, she did force herself to look now. Her heart was the very same leathery toughness as her face, and it would withstand this wound now. Despite those scars, the hurt was plain to see there in her face as he took care to separate himself from the entity that was her family. She had done it herself, after all, and she could not blame him.
The silvery coyote's expression seemed to grow wearier at his words, and now the smile was lingering, tinged with sadness. As adult as he seemed, there were things to be learned yet, and the hybrid woman now ducked her head in sad apology. “I am an old woman and they are adults. If Thornloe is your home and theirs, they'll come back to it eventually,” she added, her tone apologetic. Rachias had been here when her children were young -- and, in a way, Kaena herself was responsible for Rachias' abandonment of her own children. It was plain to see they had someone who cared for them, though.
“I would tell them you asked them to come home, but I could no more make them go than I could make you stay.” The stranger before her very well pull some hidden weapon and slice her to pieces for this honesty -- such actions were well within her blood's capabilities, as they'd proven before. Arkham had been careful to separate himself from her brood, though, and she did not see anger in him, though she might have expected it. “Would you rest here?” she asked, ever careful to differentiate between a permanent stay and a simple pause. “A while, a night -- we don't have to stay in Inferni,” she ventured. There were places they could go, and she would hunt for him, however feeble an attempt at reparation for all the means she had failed to provide before.
Even so, he did not appear to be in need of being fed -- she did still quietly marvel at the adult he had become, a lovely sort of coyote, displaying only the faintest hints of wolf, but so unlike the coyote children she had produced with Astaroth. She remembered Rachias having that same quality of her, and lamented that she had never seen Andrezej as an adult. No -- Andre had never lived to be an adult. She had failed these three and their half-sister, too.
#simple-text {
font-family:georgia; serif;
font-size:12px;
width:95%;
margin:0px auto;
line-height:16px; }
#simple-text p {
text-indent:50px; }
#simple-text b {
letter-spacing:.5px; }
#simple-text hr {
width:85%;
margin: 10px auto; }
</style>
[/html]