She would have liked to still be trailing after her parents. Never again would she trot alongside Dahrius in the evening when he set out to check their boundary. His deep laughter would not resound in her ears and fill her with the warmest joy. Papa was gone, her mother too little more than a memory. Aoibhe had been given the chance to know her father best, and to become the most like him. Many of his ways were now hers, and she looked very much like him too… but each new day changed her, made her more herself than Dahrius. She would be what he could have been, had only things gone differently… what he could have been and more.

Aoibhe would never be a submissive wolf, and in her youth she had not yet fine-tuned her social graces. The snarling face across from her made her hackles rise, though as before she knew she would not stand a chance against a more experienced adult. She did not snarl, but crouched just a fraction as if preparing to take a blow, all the more stunned by the ferocity she suddenly faced. As quickly as it had begun the strangers dangerous appearance faded away. Aoibhe’s topline quickly grew level when recognition and a smile came kindly to the stranger’s lips. It was incongruent with his rough appearance but Aoibhe did not smell hostility and so took the friendliness for what it was. Her thick tail gave a little wave of relief as he spoke to her, and she decided that he called her ‘child’ because he seemed kind of old… but then he expected her to still be with her parents? Should she have been? Aoibhe didn’t know. Papa had been gone for so long already, she hadn’t had a choice. She considered asking about this but the thought was lost when another male approached.

This one announced himself with a placating whine, which made sweet Aoibhe tip her head to the side curiously. He had a friendly face; an ear flopped over like a wee pup’s making him look like a rakish and amusing. His name is Hickory and he want to know if they lived in this place. Iblis, because that was the first male’s name, said that he did not. He was a wanderer, a loner, and Aoibhe regarded him quietly after he said this, wondering just what sort of loner he was. He had taken a protective stance when Hickory had joined them. All the packless wolves Aoibhe and Orpheus had ever met were either skiddish or half mad and dangerous. She accepted that this did not have to be the rule, realizing now that she was as much a lone wolf just now as the wanderer Iblis.

Having someone standing protectively between her and the possibility of danger inspired a twinge of déjà vu in Aoibhe. Papa had always looked out for her as an abundantly fluffy pup, usually, like Iblis did now, with unnecessary diligence. It is perhaps this that makes her forgive his considering her half a suckling whelp who couldn’t cope with strangers on her own—er, well, maybe she wasn’t very good at coping with would be murderers on her own. Freezing in place was hardly the best response to a hostile wolf in the darkness. It was a lucky thing that Iblis and Hickory were not out to chew the stocky legs off any marshmallowy two year olds tonight. Sidling bravely up alongside Iblis, Aoibhe gave her own name, with a quick glance between the two adults. “I’m Aoibhe. I don’t live here. My papa did, a long time ago, so I thought I would come and make my home here.” That was all the truth there was after all. She didn’t mention her brother, each day they spent apart she was coming to rely less on his existence to validate her own.