Waking up doesn’t hurt. One moment she’s watching Romulus’ claw his eyes out and the next her own open. Warm, mid morning sunlight flooded the forest around her. She unraveled herself from the curl she had settled into. Her head throbs with exhaustion and she chuckles bitterly. The more she slept, the more exhausted she got. How ironic. She stands up on wavering pillars and blinks as a wave of confusion comes and goes. She shouldn’t be confused, but she is. She hasn’t been in Cold Summers in a while, it hurt too much to see how empty the packlands were. However, a little bird on the wind told her that there were new marks on the trees. So she crossed the freshly marked border and had searched out her old den and found it cold and empty. She spent the first two nights in her den and found herself haunted by images and pictures that would make the most morbid of wolves quiver. She went to the place she had found the most comfort in - Romulus’ den. It was empty and most of his scent had faded, but she found herself comforted by the memory of the night she had spent with him and the nightmares became less horrible.

She forces herself to leave the safety of his den, eventually, and starts walking. She does her best to avoid her family. It’s not that she doesn’t ache for the comfort she knows they will bring, but she is afraid of what she will find if she seeks them out. Will they be angry with her for her absence or will she become needed to hold another broken heart together? She’s so angry at them, so angry that she has to sacrifice so much to hold them together. So angry at Caspian that he fell apart and that she had to care for his children for him. So angry with Odessa for leaving her, for leaving her family, when they needed her most. So angry with Pandora for leaving everything when things got rough. So angry that she had to put her own pain aside so that they could heal. Resentment burns hot and bright in her chest and anger boils in her throat until her skin feels too tight and the forest around her is confining. She breaks into a run and doesn’t feel the branches snagging her coat or the thorns scratching her delicate face. She crosses the border and keeps running, even as her muscles burn and her lungs beg her to stop. The pain fueled her onwards, pushing her until she dropped, chest heaving as the first tears she had shed since before Sophie’s death fell. She did not sob, she did not cry her eyes out. Only a few leaked from teal stars and then her eyes were dry.

She stands up, slowly on aching legs, and moves tenderly, like an elder wobbling her way across the street. She wanders through the unfamiliar forest cautiously, because while she is reckless, she is not moronic. It is then when she first smells him and it causes her entire body to go rigid, as though she had died and settled into rigor mortis. She finally convinces herself to move and so she does, tentatively and slowly. She finally lays eyes on him and it makes her heart stop in her chest and her ears go flat to her skull. She shuffles and freezes as a noise is created, drawing his attention. His ears prick up and he turns his scarred visage her way. She knows she is caught, no matter if he could see or not, and steps out of the brush without caring to be quiet. In another day, she would have been horrified to let him see the ragged state she was in, for her ribs were on the brink of being visible through her thinning coat and her face had tiny lines through it from branches and brush that had left cuts while she ran. Now, however, she knew that it would matter not how she looked. Another spark of resentment ran through her, this time at the brujo in front of her. His golden portals had always reassured her, had always made her feel safe in the way the moon made her feel safe, as though they would be there forever to keep her under their judgemental stare, and what had he done? He had ripped them out. In her rational mind, she knew that they had become useless to him, so he had done what he thought was right. Her mind was not rational, however, so the words that fall from her lips are bitter and cold.

"Romulus. Long time, no see."