private for aurèle; rabbit lake.
bear with my french when we get to it. I'm not fluent. ^^;
Even if the trees were far past the start of their healing process, there was no doubt that some sort of fire had ravaged through their home sometime in the past. In the dead of winter when the trees shook naked in the cold, they could not have begged the sun enough for the warmth to keep their leaves alive. No, every autumn, the trees witnessed the death of their own children, falling away from them one by one before being swept away by the breeze and taken on zephyrs to magical lands that a single tree could not uproot herself to see. Why Gaël felt that tinge of compassion he did not know, especially since the trees themselves were not able to experience such emotions anyway. He wasted too much thought on such menial things.
They had arrived and split up just a few days before. He could thrive just fine on his own, being the independent thing he was, but there was a constant worry in the back of his mind for his younger siblings that wandered the unfamiliar grounds elsewhere. Like one massive search party, the three of them had split up and planned to meet up again simply whenever they did. Was he an irresponsible brother for letting his brother and sister go off on their own? No. They were triplets, after all. Their first birthday was still a few months away, but Heath and Miriette were still two small, crying pups in his eyes. Regardless, the three were now split up, and Gaël trekked slowly over the lakeside, whose body appeared to have frozen over. He'd remained in his faster, smaller Secui form, feeling no need to draw attention to himself standing on two feet. He never knew how strangers would react to that--not all wolves they'd come across had been Luperci--and thus he melted into the background the best he could. He couldn't be killed, after all. How would Heath and Miriette find out?
For a long while he turned and stared down at his reflection in the lake's thick coating of ice. A rest was appropriate, he found. "C'est désespéré," he mumbled to himself, rolling his shoulders and hardly stifling the grand yawn that erupted.