ooc: This is a mandatory pack thread to get everyone on the same page with what is going on with Ichika. The date is set for the 20th. If any members are absent during this time because of travelling or festival reasons, please oocly assume that when they return X'y will meet with them personally and explain what has happened/will happen. The first round will end Feb. 27th. No posting order.
Date: Feb. 20th/ Sunset
Form: Optime
Selfishly, she had put off this arrangement for far too long. Now looking back on the time that had passed, she would have done better to speak to the whole of Ichika initially instead of letting the situation linger in the hopes that it would resolve itself. She was foolish in that regard, to trust that how she was known among her packmates would dictate what was to follow for her. They had known she was made the subleader of their home, entrusted to watch them in the stead of their Ryu. But with their absence the right had fallen to her and even with the bequeathed responsibility, she did not feel she was any more or any less that what she had been.
But this was not the case. Circumstances had changed, her outlooks now held merit and she stood in the place of where Ichika’s founding members once resided. But such a change had not been taken smoothly by all and it hurt her to see whom it affected.
Her relationship with Ichika as a whole was still new and budding, yet not as novel as her relationship of the young Saul Stormbringer and his son. It was a tentative bond still in its forging stage prematurely set and incomplete before anything could come from it. For the sake of her mate and attempting to form that bond of family, she had tried to better understand his views and in her own clumsy way, attempted to fill the role of friend. But in essence they were different people and though she was not pleased with his decision to leave, she could understand his reason for it. She looked to him not as a son nor friend, but as a wolf who had yet to achieve what he desired out of his life and felt the need to search for it. His offer to continue to communicate was taken kindly and with assurance the do the same, but in her heart she did not feel the pain of his leaving…merely a discomfort that kept her eyes away from him until he embraced her then was gone. She could not imagine the pain endured by her mate, whom had regarded the young male as his son and he his father.
And what was more were the two others that chose to pursue a purpose that Ichika could not fulfill. Though she did not know them well, the Nomad knew the pair to be an essential part of the history of the packs, a reminder of the past shared by the combining families of Dahlia and Phoenix. She was troubled to see them leave, but not upset. It would have been selfish to feel that the cause of this was her own doing. And yet, she could not escape the feeling. And it was this that pulled her from the recess of her den, from her craft and her silent wallowing to take strike toward the residences to the northern most of the territory where both her training ground and stage waited to be set and filled with the presence of their remaining Ichikan audience.
She walked down the subtle slopes of the area to take her place at its center. Her form was held tall, adorned with the wares that proved her right as a warrior to her own people and to those of this loss stricken family. Though the precedence of this moment was great, she did not call for her companion to comfort her and let him ride the radiant hues of the eve as the sun nearly slipped below the horizon. But his presence was there to be implied. His feathers were worn through her woven mane of a single, long braid with several accenting the furred shoulder on her right and within the many tails that hung from it. Her wild bangs remained as they were, obscuring her eyes from view and shrouding the world in a comforting red veil… the color that reminded her of her Shepard- her father, from whom she drew great strength especially in this moment. What would he say, if he say her now, she wondered. Would he smile that she now sat upon a height that mirrored his own, or would he be disappointed that this height was achieved without first walking down the Shepard’s road?
She waited upon her stage with the air still silent save for the gentle breath of the winds. She needed a moment of composure… of calm… of reclaimed conviction before she tilted her muzzle to the air and called for her brethren to gather and heed her words.