Overhead the moon is round and full, lighting her way through the open meadow. The dark she wolf moves at a steady pace, but she does not seem to be heading anywhere in particular, since she stops every now and then and changes direction without raising her head to search the air or listen to the still night. Eventually her steady trot slows to an ambling walk, and by the time the moon has moved halfway across the sky she stops entirely, dead center in the wide open sea of moon-silvered grass. By starlight, she is as black as night, the rusty tint of her dark coat greyed in the soft light. Only her tail, as red as that of her namesake, stands out, tipped in white and pulled in tightly beside her thin legs.

She had left Tybalt in the hollow where they had slept the last few nights, unable to listen to his peaceful breathing and watch his pale paws twitch as he ran in his dreams. Foxtail has not slept, at least not more than a few minutes at a time, for weeks. Though the young wolf has always been skinny (slender is too elegant of a word for the often abrasive she-wolf), she is little more than skin and bone and rough fur now. She has food - Tybalt never fails to bring her something – but her desire to eat is as absent as her need to sleep.

When she closes her eyes she can still see Bramble’s face, happy and smiling, with dirt on her muzzle from the digging of the den. Sometimes she turns at a dark shape in the corner of her eye, but it is never her sister. It never will be, the logical part of her knows, but she is still young enough to hope. Bramble is gone, buried in the den with her pups still inside her, down in the ground where she will never come out. Tybalt had buried her, buried his mate and his unborn puppies as Foxtail had been unable to do.

She turns her face to the sky, and the memory of Bramble hoping for a girl pup as pale as the moon bites at Foxtail’s heart. Raising her head, the wolf lets out a howl, high and sad and broken. Her voice echoes back at her from the crater’s walls, enough to sound like Bramble to comfort her, and she closes her golden eyes and imagines that her sister is howling back.