11-28-2009, 02:53 PM
[html]http://i950.photobucket.com/albums/ad34 ... bott0m.png); background-repeat:no-repeat; padding-bottom:240px; background-position:bottom center; background-color:#252237">
 It had been getting a little rough around Souls lately, and that was no mistake. First, his wandering through Halifax had landed him right in the middle of a five-on-one, which had quickly become a two-on-one/three-on-one and resulted in five people dead and two others bloodied. After his little sister had sewn up his eye, he'd needed to go and hunt down their wayward charge, Trigger, the son of the very person they'd come here to pay respects to. Of course, the yearling had managed to get himself into a fight as soon as he was alone, and Jantus had taken a bite on the arm, though it wasn't a bad one (fortunately, the attacker realized there was a new participant and didn't recommit to the fight). Now, he was happy just to be 'home' again, or at least as close to it as they had around here. Disdaining the city as a place to actually live in, his party of eleven had taken up residence a short ways outside the territory of their previous host, Phoenix Valley. The woods had no name that Jantus knew of, but they had served their purpose well enough. It was something of a secret to the kids, but this was--at least in part--a ploy to see if they wanted to come back to this place where their mother and father had lived. It wasn't that they weren't liked and even loved back at the Snow-capped Pine, they were. It was just that it probably wasn't where they wanted to spend the rest of their lives, and certainly not where their parents wanted them to spend the rest of their lives: in a pack which fought on a near-monthly basis for its continued domination of its territory, a group which had swollen to unnatural numbers in order to sit as king of hill (or valley, in this case) and be able to drive away all comers. He liked the Pine just fine, and had become its alpha a year or so after joining it. Nevertheless, while Skoll and Asphyxia had both lived lives rife with violence, that wasn't what they hoped for their children to have, and that meant that the Pine was a poor choice of residence. Right now, the massive werewolf (nearly eight feet standing and broader perhaps than any wolf before who had stepped onto this territory) was doing his best to sit still while his little sister, Mala (also of striking stature herself, especially for a girl--standing nearly seven and a half feet tall) examined her stitch-work on his eye again. Meanwhile, the white wolf Aivyr was having a conversation with Nikolov, the coyote. The big alpha supposed the rest of their group were enjoying each others' company somewhere else in the tiny space they'd claimed as their own. Probably either ridiculing Trigger for the fiasco he'd gotten into, or praising him for his first real fight. If it weren't for the sewn-up cuts around his only good eye, and the swelling around his right side where he'd been struck repeatedly with a lead pipe in the city-fight, he'd be feeling pretty good right now. Being surrounded by family and friends always made him feel at ease. |