The day is a normal, usual, fine sort of day. The spring has brought the children into their own, or as far into their own as children can be, and without fault or plunder. No deaths, no stillbirths, no sickness, even if there were a few who could not hear, who could not speak, who were formed different than those born the way nature intended wolves to be. They were all loved, they were all family, they had friends, they had comfort, they had a relative safety.

But as wont to happen in life, the merriment of the miniature pack (for it is truly large enough to be one all it’s own if they had any inclination to remain together) could not last.

There was the Shining Prince, gold and handsome despite his more advanced age - eldest of any wolf born to Moladion soil, for he was born first of all litters atop the Plateau of Trenus - sitting with their most recent addition in friends. Greer is not the most companionable thing, but Neirin speaks in calm and soothing tones from the opposite wall of his den where she was given the permission to take sanctuary. He looks well, nigh healed from the broken heart despite the pinch at the corners of his eyes that makes him look nearer his age than is pleasant to think of.

There was the Shadow-Grin, chocolate and fudge colored, laying amongst the children with a sly grin as his hind end waggles in the air and his paws splay on either side (very wide, too) of three pups he eyes on one side, the funny-five-minutes look in his eye. He is the youngest and the most eager to encourage the pups like ankh to defy the bounds of play and adventure. His mate and imprint, Alice, had not been present since the early morn, and he supposed that it was to discuss their new daughter’s future with Delya further in the territory near the heart of Asteraia that his mate had left him for.

There was the Bloody Baron, red and gold and cream and white - so like blood, offal, and bone, sunning just outside the den of his still weakened mate who lays with the children who were too tired to be awake for play after their feeding. He sleeps with a twitching paw and hind leg, chasing some prey in his mind as he has done daily to feed the woman just inside his hobbit-hole and the women of his brothers… though today it was for Fenrir to do and so he sleeps and lives vicariously through his dreams.

The Dragonborn, he is away, returning with two hares hanging from their ears and a groundhog by a hind leg.

Herschel, Halo, and Belle sleep with Alistair and Arthfael, tucked behind and on and into a nest created by Everlyse and Natu - their legs creating a corral around their sleeping forms. There was no safer place in the world than between those two women and the children sleep in that knowledge.

Ankh and Panzer yap, bat, and nip at their Uncle Seamus, the large dinner-plate paws of the white pup swatting at a too-quick brown muzzle as the black, brown, and white pup catches it on it’s way by on the whiskers in her little teeth.

Far off, Alexander has taken Vladimir to see over the flatts where he had found the bones of a rabbit ribcage in the slight dip of a dried riverbed, Semele of course following her Vaddy and Camilla unwilling to leave her sister’s side. They have wandered further than any of the pups had done before, but their guardians can see them easily and in that attention sent so far ahead, the strong wind bringing the scent of their pups, they do not realize what comes up upon them from behind the den where the hills begin rising and falling.

A bear has woken from it’s den in the crater, following along Diveen’s shared border till it veered away from troublesome rock and towards where the great bison herds might spare a child of their ilk for it’s spring-hungry belly. It is not in it’s prime any longer, but quite like the four brothers, it is not entirely lost from it’s prime either. It is thin, but it is tall and when it has food it would even be formidable. But now it steps, slow and lumbering and at it’s ease, till the hump of it’s shoulder can be seen over the mounds of the hill in which the above-ground, dug in, dens hold the treasured and the injured, and the wind stills enough that the scent of bear is suddenly exposed to the noses of those who are near.

Seamus is the first to see, the first to realize, and the first to react.

From a little grin with his nieces and nephews to a savage snarl in seconds, Panzer falls over himself in fright at the sudden fury of his Uncle, running into Ankh in his anxiousness to get away, as Seamus leaves the earth and shoots off around and up to the clay and stone sturdy roof. His noise brings those unawares to attention and Red and Gold brothers shoot up and out of their comfort to stare in horror over the hilltop roof to a bear rising up on it’s hind legs to bellow a great roar. Their hearts stop because this bear may not be a bear of Nanruan standards, but it did not need. They were years older than their war days, their time as the Bear Slayers, Bahamut’s Generals as Bear’s Bane.

Seamus is attacking in his way, swift, dodging in and out, when Fenrir could be seen cantering in a lope and freezing about where his children played with Ifrit’s, dropping his catch when a bellow of a bear’s roar sounds and he can see it also, the height surpassing the roof of the dens. “NATU! THE CHILDREN!” He screams, the loudest his voice had been heard in ages since his last warcry on Nanruan soil, and without thinking, he grabs up his Semele with a snarl to the other children with legs long enough to keep up best, and races towards the den as his mate took to working the two nearer pups. Semele, Ankh, Panzer, Camilla, then Vladimir in his jaws and his thirdborn in Natu’s when she went to help gather the two last pups and stood with the weak Everlyse to defend and Fenrir leapt the roof to aid his brothers…

In that meanwhile, as their black brother saved their future, their heirs, from the vulnerable openness, the three brothers had other worries.

The bear, it rises up and Seamus cannot stop midair as it twists with it’s spring-leaned form to put the full force of a blow into the hip of it’s attacker, spinning Seamus into a somersault. The yelp is piercing and Neirin and Ifrit are too late to stop the bear from descending onto the small of their brother’s back where the tail ends and the spine settles between the hips. Claws separates flesh, simply for the pressure of giant saucer paws into body, and it almost rises to deliver another such blow when both gold and red brother howl and leap to their brother’s aid.

Neirin cannot think, does not think, when he initially dives - he and Ifrit in perfect, age-long, imprinted tandem. The cousins are not weak, for all that their age has them diminished, and the blow jolts the bear more fully to it’s feet as it is drive up, backwards, onto the slope that would otherwise have been the roof of their dens. This, their error, sends Ifrit into a fury-- a hell-sent fury that he might again be the death of what was his, and he braves more poorly swinging blows of great claws, slashed into the face before using the momentum of the bear to sink his teeth into the paw-flesh and rip.

Neirin can see the fury and responds as only a leader can in the face of the desperation of his men. And for an instant, he can see it. He can see it all as Fenrir had always seen it for him. The eagles eye view, the hopes and harrowing truth of their danger. His red brother tears into a paw and draws such ire that he fears the red brother, his cousin by his mother and the red’s father, will fall before the bear might be ended. He fears, but that fear is momentary. With Fenrir frantic to drag Seamus by hind leg, by scruff, by back, to the side of the hill in sight of the dens-- he can help it. He can help it all and give not only Ifrit the chance of vengeance and Fenrir a chance to save the youngest of their brotherhood…

He can save what was left of their lineage that lay beneath the slowly weakening rooftop that sheltered their family, his family.

He lunges as Ifrit savages at swinging paws, the bear bellowing his rage and ill intent, finding the high ground and, as the bear steps back, he snarls, grabbing teeth just behind the head at the back of the neck and with teeth fastened, he becomes dead weight to tilt back the bear’s head and teeter the whole of the beast back-- his cousin, his Bloody Baron, incapable of missing the sudden opening for victory.

And he doesn’t… but his bite is too low, and as the bear goes over in a backwards fall, it uses that great neck muscle to reach down and grab Ifrit by the skull as the red brother grabs the meaty esophagus and jugular.

All three fall at the mouth of the four dens, Neirin beneath the great weight of the bear and landing badly - the crack loud even from beneath the fleshy boulder atop him - with Ifrit screaming into the meat of a profusely bleeding throat as the bear roars around the gorey remnants of his throat and the skull in it’s teeth.