Once again, Kairos had wandered away from the safety of Tall Protector and Milk-Giver and, once gain, the fact bothered her little. Every day she breathed she felt her power coalesce and grow inside her, feeding her independent spirit with illusions of grandeur that might have shocked even the most vain wolf to hear them. Her immortal mindset saw her do reckless things, strange things that Kairos herself was unable to explain. Her side still smarted from her little leap over a waterfall, but she reveled in the pain. It made her feel alive in a way nothing and nobody else could. Fear was a word without a place in the young wolf's dictionary, exhilaration the sentiment she hunted like a lioness. The only varg with any power to speak sense into her soul couldn't speak at all. And why was this? Because she had ordained it such.

Around her the terrain had shifted from grassland and peppery sagebrush to shale and gray rockscapes that undulated like the ocean's waves beneath her paws. She traipsed the treacherous terrain easily, however, having practiced such feats daily in her home at the crags. To her left she felt a dank breeze hit her in the muzzle and she sneezed violently, turning her head to face the assault as was her nature. Her two black and blue orbs picked up a fissure in the earth so narrow it could barely be called a cave, and the alluring scent of bats and their guano bid her enter. Without a second thought, the young white female held her breath and slipped through the narrow entrance in the rock face. For a second she felt her broad chest stick fast, held between two awkwardly jutting rocks, and she glanced downwards curiously, although her pupils had not yet adjusted to the sudden darkness. Without a hint of panic, the she-wolf exhaled sharply and pushed herself through the gap and into a cavern. Her eyes met a low-roofed hollow splintered with stalagmites and small pools of ice water. The almost constant darkness was broken here and there by holes in the ceiling through which pale sunlight filtered, shafts of warmth in an otherwise black and lonely world.

A sharp burst of sound deafened the little wolf and she sleeked her ears to her skull against the tirade of noise, eyes roving the darkness, searching for the source of the outburst. Not far above her the obscurity seemed to thicken and move, shifting as though it were alive. Kairos stood on her hind-legs to better explore the strange, new sight, but lost her balance and toppled hard onto her wounded flank instead, yelping in surprise. The false midnight exploded into a deafening burst of wing-beats, the harshness of reality coming down like a dark wave on the prostate wolf. She felt the heaviness of warm, leathery skin slapping her body in a thousand places, and the world glittered with lightning-sparks of light as the holes in the roof were opened and shut again. For a moment she was lost in the ethereal moment, senses swimming, but came to her senses just in time. As the last of the bats, angered and gibbering, broke through the hole in the earth, she snapped shut her jaws and snagged a leg between them. Without another pause, the wolf was on her feet and ripping into her prey while it screamed its agony to the world, its killer reeking of the droppings she had slipped in.

Only when the last warm sliver of flesh disappeared down her gullet did Kairos look up again, belching appreciatively.