Sila

i can feel the thunder that’s breaking in your heart

Loner. She realizes now just how impersonal the term truly is – or rather, how it really feels. She thinks on the word and she feels a pit within her very core open, a vacancy that had once been filled with rank and purpose, with Samus and her siblings, her parents and her pack. She is, yes, a loner but she is alone too. It bleeds into each and every crevice of her life even as she had lingered on the borders of Taviora, resolute to make a new home at the foothills of Spirane, her birthplace. Close, she thinks, close enough to stave off homesickness but far enough away to find a new purpose too. Yet, she finds herself in Spirane, paws making their way up the rocky slopes as spring unfurls around her.

It isn’t long before she finds herself at the place she had been born all those years ago. It is overgrown, alive with flowers and bees that rise from soil and stone alike. It is there though, she can see, the slightest hint of where a den’s mouth had once been carved out but it lays buried, and within it lays her mother, a sweet-sounding ghost in Sila’s ears as she stands in silence. Her lips are taut, though they move every so often as if to speak a work but then she frowns and stops. What was she meant to say? "Everybody’s gone now, mother,” she says finally with a sigh and a sad smile, “and those that aren’t, I just can’t find.” Her mother would understand, she knows that much. After all, Niviaq had lost an entire pack, an entire life, and so Sila feels some weight shift across her shoulders at uttering the truth of it - she can't find anybody. They might not be gone, but she just can’t bring herself to find them, or they her. She lapses into silence then for some time, ignoring the sun and the shadows that shift, only rousing when she hears the nearness of another’s unfamiliar pawsteps.

She whirls around with wide eyes, her heart a hummingbird as she considers herself – was she trespassing? She breathes in deeply when she finds herself unable to recognize the other wolf. Was he a newcomer? She considers him for some moments before she gives her mother’s grave a look once again. "I know – once a wolf of Spirane, always one. I’m being a bit of a coward, aren’t I?” She grins sheepishly at the mound of flowers and rocks before bowing to it, as if it were truly a wolf. Hell, he might have even heard her speak to it, but she finds herself shoving aside that concern as she sucks in a breath of courage and begins at a jog towards the wolf.

She slows in her approach, her natural cautiousness bleeding through as she waves her tail and gives him a wane grin, her ears back slightly with nerves. "Oh, sorry! I didn’t realize you were so...in thought,” she gets out with a small dip of her head. He had seemed it, at least, when she had finally been able to make out his face completely. Maybe...maybe, she thinks, his thoughts might be better than her own though. Maybe they would keep hers from roaming too far if there was something she could help him with...