It was a small part, but a part nonetheless. It was a part of him. A bone, narrow and delicate, bleached white, a crescent moon of a rib that had rested alongside the others for long enough. Sidhe had told her, had told Beltane. Selfish, she'd said, to keep him confined to the place he'd never known as his true home. Ah, Beltane had sighed, and then she'd agreed. But it had to be her to take him back to Taviora, for she'd been the one to keep him from the forests. So, she'd summoned him from their den, had taken the bone gently between her teeth and revelled in the sensation of Wraith being with her once again...Eventually, she'd crept over the borders of Iromar and towards the flooded forests of the north. Eventually.
Beltane had never been a wolf of Taviora, but she did not hesitate to pass across the borders. The borders were, after all, barely there. The borders had become a ghost, a lingering memory of a declaration made many years ago. Even then, Beltane struggled to recall the name of the forest's leaders. Zelda, Beltane remembered, but she could not find the woman's scent anywhere among the watterlogged soil and lush pines. She could not hear the name in the wind, or spoken by the bones beneath. Even Wraith was silent, little more than a thrumming between her teeth. Taviora was the land of the dead, and Beltane entered it, welcomed the ecstatic quiver that ran the length of her spine as she did so. In the land of the dead, Beltane was no intruder.
Late afternoon sun poured through the canopy, but Beltane sought darker shadows. Wraith had been a dweller of deeper, darker places; a tangle of roots as old as Taviora itself, dug out and into by Wraith. Beltane remembered his words, her deafened ear turned towards nothingness to listen even then as she crept further and further into the territory.
Wild, ice-blue eyes flickered with feverish intensity. Her breathing quickened into sharp, excited breaths as she found it: Wraith's hollow. So old, ancient, and so lonely. Branches and debris had come to cover the dark tunnel that lead below, and she could smell fox and rat alike from within. The scent of old herbs still permeated the earth below, and the flooding had not reached his former home...Gently, she placed the bone - Wraith - aside, whispering the quietest of words to him before she began her work. Clear a path, she would, and then she'd crawl on down there into the shadows with him. She'd return a piece of him home, at last.