Tithe

Cold. The chill was starting to seep air as summer had slipped into fall and the autumn was beginning to embrace the kiss of winter. Steel grey eyes still looked into the snowy mountain peaks and his heart continued to break with his desire to feel the thin air and the frost under his feet. He longed for the trails that he knew, the stones at his side, and the company he had kept. Everything in him wished he could turn back time to a place where everything was right.

That time never existed, he realised. There had always been that deepness within all of them. A blood thirst and possibility for betrayal. All it took was a call and an action to destroy everything. Even an action thought to have been innocent, or a sign of loyalty, could be seen as traitorous and worthy of punishment.

A soft whine came from his lips and Tithe finally turned his face away from the eyes of Spirane. He turned away from his hopes, and his dreams. Away from everything he had built though his heart still beat for that which he left. Those he had called pack, and family, and the things he had left behind. He missed his bats and he yearned to feel the bones he had coveted in his paws again. In his confusion and his haste to leave he had not even stopped to say goodbye to the creatures and things that had kept him company in his large mountain cave.

The terrain shifted to that of the fields and it was not long before he approached the fox den he and Pandora had been using for their home. Their scents had grown thick over the vulpes’. Tithe’s mood shifted to that of bittersweetness. She had remained. She among the few. Whatever had drawn them together. Fate, attraction, happenstance, he felt himself tied to her in a bind he could not break, and he dared not attempt to. Death, he had been told, would sever it. But neither of them seemed to mind the connection now. Her nearness comforted him, and brought peace to his thoughts. When they had first met he vowed to be anything and everything she needed. She had not spoken a word, but their roles had switched and she was his everything. All he had left.

Without looking up and without back he sighed into a silvery heep on the ground in front of their den. Not content, but not troubled. He just was.