Silence.
Silence is all that greets my call as I stand with my paws pressed into the thin filament of snow. What else did I expect? I hadn't quite missed them really and yet I had - my soul ached for the comfort of family. Blood needs blood you see and I had been without for such a long time. It wasn't that my life was difficult per say. In fact, it had been rather simple if one could stand masochistic bastards day in and day out. I didn't want to need them yet I knew, as a hare knows that it is prey, that without them I was nothing. A remnant of wolves that were gone. Wherever Jumanji had gone had never mattered and Lurid's bones were rotten beneath the murky waters of Iromar, her flesh long since devoured and absorbed into the reptilian bodies of the alligators. Did that make them her in some way?
My jaws part in a silent sigh and the air puffs up white before my red-pink eyes before my eyelids close and I breath in the swampy scent of Iromar. I was the only one of my litter to come out with a dark pelt although the gray marks on me along with the distinctive white spots above my eye and the lines underneath them remind me of my siblings. I was lovely, really, and I used it to my advantage. A whine draws my attention with a sudden snap of my head, ears jamming back into my skull and eyes flashing open in hostility at whatever interloper dare sneak up on me.
Yet the vision before me halts my tongue and I stand there with jaws agape as my eyes slide down her body and back to her face and her voice caresses my auds. "Taji," I breath, my voice faint in my astonishment. My heart thud-thumps in my chest and reboots as I take a step towards her, just as consumed with her as she was with me. "Where.." I begin very softly, my tail suddenly finding life as it begins to swish back and forth and the joy within me burgeoning. I remembered Malum being furious with Taji, for blaming her, but I couldn't blame my sister. The alligators had chosen and Lurid had done what a mother should.
It is my absorption of the sister before me that stays me attentions from falling on the newly arrived Malum. It is only as his scent infiltrates, on the brink of me stepping forward with the need to touch my sister, that stops me. I jolt my head around with an audible gasp, pupils wide as I spy my brother. He bumps his head into Taji's and then looks at me. Lea. My name, never Malleah, is what undoes all the years of tightly wound control. I blink and suddenly they swirl as tears begin to trickle out of the corners of my eye and I sink down low to the ground with a whine, begging them to come to me even as I struggle to crawl towards them. "Mal... Taji...." It is all I can say because in one fell swoop my family is returned to me and my body is shattered even as it is whole.
(sorry going to try her in first person for a bit :P)