It seemed like it happened so fast, and also so slow. Hemlock watched as the lands grew more and more quiet the moment Blackthorn got his children. He watched and witnessed as his focus seemed to shift more from the pack and more into dealing with his women and brood he had created. Maybe he found out being a parent wasn’t all that easy. Hemlock wouldn’t know, he wasn’t a parent, but he was almost fully grown now. He had grown in this twisted pack, this twisted world and he hated it all. Not like it mattered to him, he was broken before all this had happened, fight as he had against it curiosity got the best of him. He had bitten from the forbidden fruit and hadn’t forgotten it. His parents love didn’t help him, nor his siblings. He watched his sister get rescued, his excuse to stay, yet he still remained here long after that. A pack of disgusting monsters, he fit right in. He kept his head low though, he wasn’t about to serve Blackthorne and do all he could to help him. He was cold-blooded, and he wasn’t about to help him grow his pack.

About the only one he had found solace in was Adrian, and Hemlock had his suspicions that maybe his adopted sister knew his dirty secret. He had purposefully rolled in the corpse of the dead wolf to rid himself of his family’s scent, but he had also ate the rotting flesh as well. Disgusting as old meat was he found the taste of that particular flesh better than any fresh kill he managed to make. Hemlock grit his teeth. Why was he like this? His sisters, his brother, father and mother, none of them were like this. The Aztecs were peaceful, don’t harm only protect, type of family. His father taught him all he could about their heritage, even taught them Nahuatl when he could, though Hemlock himself would never be able to speak it, and maybe not even be perfect at understanding it. His mother was a lot less peaceful. She was certainly more for killing and putting an end to the bad, but she was still good natured, loving and certainly not a cannibal. She didn’t mind them like his father did, but he was pretty certain she wasn’t one. She would have accepted him. Love though wouldn’t fix how he felt about himself.

He didn’t even know that the rest of his family had left Moladion, left him alone, not yet at least. He had parted ways with them, and with relations between Iromar and Taviora as they were he never tried to see them. With the recent change, the break to the silence, maybe he should soon. He wasn’t sure how he felt about still being here. The new Monarch, Avery, was very quick on the uptake that he was a mute, she even gave him a way, albeit slow to tell her where he wanted to belong. Honestly… he didn’t belong anywhere in the normal ranks, but he wanted to blend in, to fit in. So he picked hunter. It was about the only skill he really had, other than scouting. He knew he had the build to be anything they needed him too, and while he was still small, he was already bigger than both his parents had been… he had always been much larger than his siblings, but he never really expected to get bigger than his parents back then. He really was different. What was more, he hated eating prey. It just wasn’t good. He sighed, his ears folding back, he was trying to fit in here, continue living in his birth home, but he didn’t know if he could continue being around wolves that weren’t like him. Monsters.

Asteraia he heard was full of wolves like him, but did he want to be around them? The young wolf curled up, keeping himself isolated while laying on top of the den his family was forced to abandon. Maybe the world was better off without him, but he also just wanted to live.