“The adult human body contains around 5 liters of blood. Losing a third of that, in a short time, very easily leads to death. I doubt Alurian realizes how much blood she lost in her encounter with the king’s dragon. Enough, certainly, that she should not have been standing, much less arguing with me.”

~ Bek Trent, M.A.S.O

The wolf is the first to the earth, and she shakes irritably as soon as her paws touch the soil. Wolves are not beings meant to fly. She is made to be close to the earth, racing the winds. Not riding them. Behind her, the dragons snort mockingly, but she pays them little mind. Instead, Elorian fills her nose with the sweet, familiar breath of the forest. When it stings, she sneezes. Her breath hangs in front of her, frigid white smoke that is cold on her whiskers, heavy and hollow. Little has changed in the deepwood. The tree wolves were here, some weeks past, but not recently. Aside from those beasts, the world sleeps around them.

“She may be expecting us.”

Bek’s voice draws the wolf’s ears back as she turns to look at him. She huffs softly, breath freezing before her once more. The humans cannot see the village; their eyes are deceived by magic.

“Maybe.” Silver’s response is dismissive. Elorian senses Bek’s uncertainty in the way he hesitates before he trudges forward through the snow. Silver does not immediately move to follow him, but turns instead to stare into the trees. The wolf does not know what her human eyes see. Elorian sees only trees standing silent sentinel, their gray, weather-beaten trunks still and ghostly. Never once has she seen the girl in such a black rage, like a wolf come home to find her den occupied by some strange beast. The hostility that radiates from Silver is festering, latent, coiled to strike.

A glance in the direction of the dragons as they slide into invisibility tells her they feel the same.

“They are both out of sorts, wolf,” the dragons’ soft thrum comes to Elorian as she watches Silver finally turn and follow after the boy. “The dragon kin rage when they have been wounded. These two have both suffered grave wounds.”

“Humans are stranger beasts than us,” the wolf rumbles, “their rage too often turns amiss.”

“Go with them. We will watch over the village.”

After a long moment, the wolf goes, wiry legs eating up the distance between her and the humans. It is not long before she senses the buzz of the Veil, a magic known even to beastkind. It lifts the fur along her neck, and as it does, a curtain draws back on the world. The presence of the forest has changed. Where before she felt its watchful gaze, now it looks away, as if it does not care to look to the place where humans make their home.

They have entered the village of Icthuria.

And there stands the woman whom the wolf last knew as a girl, as if expecting them. Her scent is different, her red hair grown long and let loose to wreath her shoulders and neck. Only her blue eyes are the same, and in them the wolf sees a deep sorrow that has matured in the long years since the orphan girl left them. This is the onkelrha of Icthuria, not the witch-girl of Alti, and she is only alone where she stands; her pack is behind her, nestled in their winter houses, hidden away from the world.

“I was afraid I would never see you again,” Cara observes softly as they come to a halt before her. Her voice, the wolf notes, is also unchanged – musical, soft and gentle. None of them answer. “We can talk inside, where it’s warmer,” the woman offers.

“Let’s,” Bek says with a glance at Silver, gesturing back into the village. Cara nods and turns when the girl says nothing, the sky-blue fabric of the onkelrha’s long skirt flaring behind her. They follow into the twisting, snow-coated streets of Icthuria, past the wood-walled houses and the trees that house both humans and beasts, past the fallow fields and the lone shadows of men and women and children. The wolf knows this place. She came sometimes with the tree wolves, skirting the fringes of the Veil. And she came with Silver, long ago, when the girl was first tasked with the duty of nerske. Her nose leads her way even without the onkelrha as their guide, but the wolf’s eyes are only for Silver.

Of course, Elorian understands lies. They have a scent. She sees them, as such, even where a human might not. Silver lied when she said the ancient dragon said nothing to her. But what is a lie when her human still lives? What power is there in words when a creature is bloodied as the girl has been, and still walks and breathes as if unscathed? The king’s dragon spoke to her, but that is not strange - she is nerske. It would make sense for the last of the ancient dragons to speak to her, if only to give her a message to carry to mankind.

The tree wolves would think, nonetheless, that there is meaning in this deceit.

Zien has always claimed men to be creatures of guile and aggression. No different from wolves. No different from any beast. Clever. Short-sighted. Compassionate. Easily misled. So, the wolf watches Silver speculatively as they walk, as a light snow begins to fall and the girl lifts a hand to cup it in her palm.

Their path is open soon, a door in a house that smells of the onkelhra. They move swiftly into the relative warmth, the ice forgotten behind them. Only the onkelrha lingers, staring back into the white world as if she can make out the dragons beyond the Veil if she only stares hard enough. Minutes pass before she turns from the door to look at them, and falls still, blue eyes staring at a point over the wolf’s head. Elorian follows her gaze.

Silver is standing still as well, hazel-green eyes focused not really on Cara, it seems to the wolf, but past her, past her and into something else…some other world. Even when the door closes, they remain fixed there. And in that moment, the wolf understands something about the lie Silver told. However close they may be to her, Silver is not among them. Her eyes are distant, sorrowful, empty. A darkness flickers in them…understanding. Distrust. That, too, is a part of the lie. The ancient dragon did not share a message meant for mankind or for the nerske, but for Silver alone. A truth, a memory…

So thinking, the wolf feels the stirring of a memory in her own heart. Long distant, that memory is caged within the confines of her new world. She is a wolf, but not a wolf. Is that not what Feai told her? Is it not what the crow, strange being who should not have spoken to her, had said when she stood outside the MASO, looking in on the girl while the Zara’s shadows stretched through the deepwood? She can remain by Silver’s side. She can wander the world beside this human, as a wolf should its pack, but where Silver goes in the long nights as she sleeps, and where she goes now – to those places, no one can follow.