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Myrika is by Alaine!
Safe, and soft. Perhaps that was why Ezekiel had picked her, after all the rest -- because she was soft, and therefore malleable to his will. How many ways had he influenced her? There was still a softness to her, but she was learning to lead -- however slowly and however awkwardly, still uncertain of her own authority. Having shed it in the privacy of this room with her sister, she could look at it with a more cynical perspective. Perhaps she was only a half-finished sculpture, her shaping truncated; perhaps Ezekiel had not meant to depart so suddenly from the clan. She did not feel like a leader, however often her voice betrayed her.
The pale muzzle in her hair and closeness of her sister drew some of the creeping thoughts and their shadows away. Myrika squeezed the smaller hand and then clutched it with her other one, too, so both hands were wrapped around her sister's. She had never felt quite so utterly useless ever before in her life, and it was a difficult feeling to combat. This, her smallness in and useless gestures in the face of clear anguish.
Perhaps she would have been safer still if she'd never left the tiny cabin, tucked away in the forest. She had revisited it, and it seemed none had taken residence there since her -- at least, not long enough for their scent to have permeated the walls. She had still smelled lingering traces of herself and Thamur -- not canine scents, but the lingering breath of some leatherwork or fabric, the ash and dust of an old fire, the stale scent of old hay and firewood. Separated from the world, she might have been the safest canine on the planet. And she still would not have Vesper or friends or family. But perhaps she wouldn't have had to fight or kill, either.
You deserve to be safe and okay, too, she muttered, glancing toward the wall. There had been a chalkboard there, and its faded online still stood starkly against the paint. She did not deserve all her safety and happiness, for some of it was certainly at the expense of her sister. She looked back toward the translucent eyes, the pale coyote face with an appropriately shaped and sized coyote body to go along with it. And if you're not, if -- something else happened and I didn't do anything, she started, shaking her head just a little. I won't be.
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