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They slept out in the open, even in the January air. Like true canines they curl into themselves, tail upon nose to keep the air they breathed warm. Side by side they gleaned heat from one another, and if the snow fell then it fell. It would land on them all throughout the night and in the morning they would break through the crust of ice that formed around them and served only to insulate them further. And when they shook the frozen water from their pelts they would spend the next few moments leaping here and there, over one another, dashing madly through the open fields and back again to their starting point. Like children, light hearted and free spirited, they threw back their heads and let their tongues loll out of their mouths and they laughed.
Against the white of winter the ivory of her pelt blended in perfectly. Only azure eyes stood out as even the small flecks of grey that crept up her two front legs tried to vanish in the powdery white. Her mate's coat was more bold, his own ivory stain with big splatters of ink. Though he called her a dove and told her that he preferred her cotton coat over his own, she would tell him that at least he was easy to spot when they dashed away from one another in their perpetual games of chase and tag. He would murmur something about her sky eyes that lit up when they glanced his way and then the compliments would get competitive until they were finally forced to call a truce.
And so another winter was passing by them, the second since their departure from Dahlia de Mai. Together, alone, they celebrated the second birthday of their children and sent happy wishes out into the world for them. That any of their girls would hear their parents long, musical howls was wishful thinking, but they crooned anyway, notes rising up into the sky, into outer space, into heaven wherever it might lay. And afterwards they laughed and traded thoughts on what they might be up to, or where they might have gone.
For the first year Din and Farore had stayed with them, glued to them as if they too would be whisked away like little Nayru. Who could have guessed where the girl had gone? Simply vanished into thin air. They had searched, of course, but eventually had to move on. Slay had worn his grief well, perhaps putting on a stronger face only to ease Cer's own grief. Farore and Din had insisted that Nayru lived, thrived even, somewhere, and didn’t take much time to move on past the absence of their sister. Cercelee had no choice but to follow suit.
The four of them were inseparable, in a way Cercelee had never known before. Their closeness was harder to accept when Cercelee counted the number of family and friends who had up and left her. So she simply did not count. Nor did she care to recall her own leaving, as desperate as it had been. Yet neither did she regret her abandonment of Dahlia de Mai, a single glance to Farore's amethyst eyes or a caress of Din's raven head convinced her that she had been right. Haku would have killed them all had he his way, and there had been nothing stopping him then.
Yet the year passed and Farore grew restless and though Cercelee refused to tell the girl of where they came, Slay finally did. They went to sleep one night and in the morning their tall, slender daughter was gone and had taken Din with her. They had known it was coming and while the trail that would lead them to their two daughters and to a pack they had once loved lay in one direction, they turned in the other and continued on.
Eventually Din came back, but only long enough to tell them Farore was insistent on finding Nayru. Slay smiled at the resolution of his daughter, and Cercelee fretted and Din grew inspired and decided to strike out on her own. When Farore caught up to them once more it was summer and they travelled slowly and stopped often and their violet eyed daughter burst upon them like a whirlwind of news. Nayru is alive. She was leading Dahlia de Mai. Dahlia is no more. They had to calm the girl before they could get any of the information clear.
The emotions that washed over Cercelee were confusing in their complexity. Elation that her daughter lived, pride that Nayru had taken over the very pack that she had led once, and despair at the year lost of Nayru's childhood and their continued separation. Briefly they spoke of returning but both knew it was silly. Nothing was left for them, and if Farore's words rang true not even Dahlia de Mai remained, the pack they had both built from the ground up. Only Nayru was there, their last link to lives they had left behind, but she wasn't really their link anymore.
She had a mate, or something of the like so Farore said. A large, ebony male and Slay chuckled warmly at this. A new home, her own pack not polluted with tiffs and trifles of the past, unmarred by the poison Haku had injected into Cercelee's own home. Members that Cercelee could not recognize the names of, and as Cer and Slay asked after each and every friend they had known Farore shook her head. No, they were not in Dahlia anymore.
So they went their own way, and Farore had too. They pointed her in the direction Din had gone and watched their last daughter flew from them, a young bird but well seasoned at flying. So their nest was truly empty and though Cercelee sighed every now and then, Slay never let her spirits sink for too long, eliciting a smile with playful nips until she gave in to his antics.
And they continued on the rest of that year until it was winter again, just past the second birthday of the triplets and Cercelee murmured wishes that they'd be parents again, someday. Though they both knew it was unlikely, for the woman had not conceived once in all the times they made love—which was often—the man hesitated not a moment taking her into his arms. Afterwards Cercelee rolled away from him and lumbered off by herself. It was not uncommon for them to wander here and there without the other, for they never went far enough that they could not call out to one another as a true wolf should, and so the piebald male did not protest as his dove flitted away from him.
The night was calm, only the lightest of snow fell and Cercelee felt at peace, turning her head up to the heaves. Always looking to the sky, or the sea, and she tried to count the number of suns that burned in other solar systems but soon lost count. It did not matter, she didn't like to keep count of anything, because if her mind was not in the now than it was not where it should be. Now there was again one star, two star, three… and now there again was one. The woman was again starting the count over when she heard the snap of the branch as a clumsy foot fell on it. When she looked up and recognized the face the breath flew from her lungs and she let out only the tiniest of gasps.
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ADRASTOS. 719
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He was getting to be an old man, slowly creeping up to his eighth year. Bones and joints were beginning to feel stiff in the mornings, and the rich stony slate of his face was colored with light grey and white. He was getting washed out and he knew this. He knew that he had been washed out for some time now. Perhaps he had been washed out all along, at least he had always just been getting washed along. From birth he had never been stable, never quite as sturdy or stationary as he should have been. Born in Clouded Tears, thrown to Storm, swept up by Azathoth—his whole childhood was a torrent of change. Never had any of the packs kept him close and he had become nomadic, letting the tides take him where they would. Eventually they took him to Lyla.
It had been in his second year he met her and mated her--the lovely lady who in a twisted way reminded him of his mother so. Not so small, but shock white with arctic eyes, he couldn’t keep away from the snow lady. In his third she had bore him children and it wasn't even in his fourth that he lost her. Even she could not be stable, could not resist the never ending waves that crashed against him and threw them where they would. With her he had taken their two sons, reincarnations of his father and brother and left only little Cercelee. Named for her great grandmother, reminiscent of her grandmother and mother, Adrastos Morpheus had had no use for the child.
Clouded Tears had stayed, barely changed. Those the ghosts that haunted the territory were different it was all the same. Loss and loneliness and nothing more. His parents were dead, his siblings scattered and only a dutiful cousin to take in his anything-but-wayward ward. Laruku had accepted the charge as he accepted all others—a sad look and a shake of the head to the dead bead father who left her there. Those who came from Sadira blood eventually turned up now and then, passed through, maybe left a part of themselves. Adrastos left Cercelee and he hadn't once regretted the choice.
Lyla was the only face who haunted him, and it mattered not that her fury would know no bounds at his betrayal of his only living child. The enormous man was only a shell, nothing filled his great body but the usual organs and bones required for any mammal. Life had little meaning, nothing more than eat, sleep and shit every now and then. It was how he passed his fourth year, his fifth, and even his sixth. What events transpired then, or what souls he met, he did not remember, and they did not matter. Less and less he thought of Lyla, and even less he thought of Tuki, or Lisi, or Cer. He didn't even think of himself much, existing almost as an entity outside of himself.
In his seventh year he learned of Aiji's death, many years before and he found it impossible to grieve a dead sister so long lost. The child that spoke to him of the raven sibling bore the surname of de Sadira, though he couldn't recall her first name. It did not matter what his great niece was named, for she passed through and on out of his life as all the others had. That Aiji was gone did not surprise him, for surely Lisichka, Iskata and Laika had suffered similar fates, and even if it weren't true Adrastos fancied himself the last of that litter. Even if they lived somewhere, they were dead to him, and so he was the only one who had made it to seven.
After his encounter with the de Sadira girl he had not expected to see any other ghosts. Surely she would be the last reminder of a life he hadn’t lived in well over six years. That however was not how life worked and whether some divine force had brought the girl into his path, or it was purely coincidental Adrastos could not know. Yet she was there and the man could think of nothing suitable to say as he stared into what could be the face of his only daughter.
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751
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Her paws became heavy stones and her heart a hard lump that leaped into her throat. Cercelee tried to swallow it down but it only got caught up and caused her to nearly choke. The man's blue-grey eyes seemed the same as she had always known them, as she remembered at their parting, but his face was grizzled and grey—much more aged than the years could account for. Lips and tongue suddenly became dumb, unable to formulate any words. Instead only she could think of him at their last parting. The very last time she had ever seen the man. Nearly five years of time had elapsed since then, though it seemed much longer. It seemed a lifetime.
I can't keep her anymore Laruku. The girl remembered the day, remembered the man leading her to a strange place, being greeting by a strange man and the awful words the two had exchanged. As if Cercelee was not peering up at them the whole time with wide, frightened eyes of a child. Her father had seemed so frazzled, so disheveled. She too of course had been upset at the change in their family, the absence of Lyla, Tuki and Lisi, but she had been more upset at the abandonment that followed. The words that had come from his mouth and stuck with her from then until now, as they came flooding back to her. I hate her.
Now she stared into the face of the man, the father, who had claimed hatred. Slowly the numbness of her face melted and her ears fell flat against her small skull. Almost she wanted to say Do you still hate me? Yet it was so long ago, he hadn't been of the right mind (Cercelee told herself this and desperately wished to believe it) and perhaps it didn't matter. What was done was done. Adrastos had left her and had not seen her life develop. He had not seen and could not know how Laruku dutifully care for her as he did all the lost children that found their way to Clouded Tears. Could not know how Haku, Adrastos's cousin, had borne a girl very near to Cercelee's age and they had become fast friends. How Haku had raised them both, run one off and raped the other. Adrastos simply could not know these things.
Nor could he know how Cercelee found her way back to Laruku, how the fire had separated them once more but she had then built something for herself. Colibri, the grandmother of her cousin, had taken the shaken girl under her wing, and Mew had come along and there had been Hanna. All of them family and together they had planted the seeds that grew into Dahlia de Mai. Then Slay. Always Slay. Still Slay. It had been years and Slay was the only consistent being in her life. Thinking of the burly, two toned man Cercelee let out a breath she had been holding too long and looked hard into the eyes of her father, eyes that had not seen any of this and could never know what had transpired in his little girl's life.
When the numbness left her the flood of anger filled her. He had done wrong. He had not been there for her. He had… he had… he had… and then it left her as soon as it had come. He had not been there in five years and perhaps he was not the same being she had known once. Surely she was not the same. And what father or mother truly saw the fruition of their children? Farore and Din were off doing their own thing and Cercelee had let them go, as adults. Nayru was alive and out there and Cercelee had not seen the girl grow up. Nayru had done the same as she, without a home, rose to the top and made one for herself. Yet Cercelee had not abandoned the girl. She had never hated her own child.
Sky eyes stayed glued to the male, the grizzled face of an old man she had mostly forgotten but had somehow been magically conjured up. Words still tumbled about in her mouth, unspoken. Father? Adrastos? What was his name to her anymore? Yet no words came, Cercelee could make no movement, but finally she was able to swallow the terrified heart that had leaped into her throat and force it back into its proper place—beating far too fast in her chest.
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Adrastos:629
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The child of ivory and ice stood there, still as a statue and Adrastos Morpheus simply stared back into a face he had long ago accepted he would never see again. That she did not speak first unnerved him, why did his daughter, his only living child, say nothing in the face of her father? Slate eyes searched for some answer, and Adrastos was suddenly aware that the girl could probably recall their parting words. The crazed man who had so stoically led her on a march across the lands, saying little until they reached the ghost child receptacle known as Clouded Tears. There his hard exterior had cracked and crumbled under the scrutinizing eyes and words of Laruku Tears and Adratsos's own replies has been hasty and hateful, desperate and deplorable.
Yet so much time had passed, that was so long ago, Adrastos could scarcely believe his words still rang true in her head or that she could even remember them. The girl had been a child then, a small trusting thing, following her father—the hero of her heart—without question only to be passed off like unwanted goods. Now, now the creature that stood before him made him dizzy with feeling. It wasn't just his daughter that stood staring at him. It was his mother, his sister Laika, and countless others that could call the Sadira bloodline their own. Though her eyes were a paler color than that of his mother, he could see the ghost of the matriarch in her features. He wondered how many times over the years had his little girl had to content with a dead grandmother?
The slow steady pace of his heart quickened with each second that passed between them. Someone had to speak, someone had to say something. Almost Cer, her pet name, her love name. Who but those who knew her best could call her that? Yet the old man knew he knew her not at all and had no right to use such endearing names. Almost Ceres but it would have been a slip of the tongue. Always he had loved his daughter best, because he had loved his mother best, but when Lyla had died, who too had looked stunningly like a Sadira queen, he couldn't face anymore blue eyes, snow faced females.
The girl swallowed something hard and Adrastos' heart skipped, waiting for the words that surely would follow the clearing of the woman's throat, but nothing came and soon enough he felt something drop like a rock in his stomach. All of a sudden it was her shoulder, then her side, then her tail end as the child was fleeing from him. Slowly, but surely. Just as suddenly as she had appeared and stared at him for what seemed like a stretching eternity, she left and her movements seemed to work in the same slow motion as their gazing at one another. For long years he had felt nothing—no remorse, no sorrow, very little guilt and certainly not happiness or joy—and now he felt panic. She was leaving.
"Cercelee!" Like a magic word the silence was broken between them, whatever strange spell that kept them unable to speak shattered and the girl, who had really only moved two feet away turned her head over her shoulder, but did not bother to turn her body and truly face her father. "Wait." And she only looked at him, her cool eyes chilling him though they held no particular clues of disdain, only a dull curiosity as to why this man might be calling her back five years later. "Please." The pleading in his voice surprised even him, but it worked, and his little girl turned her body and set her stony face to him.
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