you do not know who is your friend

or who is your enemy

until the   ICE breaks.

Snow. It felt like home. It felt like - like everything bitter and painful, edging his world in the same frame of jarring, jagged heartache that had prevailed since encountering Brenton. Everything was wrong, and when the snow had come, falling softly across the world... he remembered things he wished he didn't; the painful grip of his father's teeth on his scruff, the frigid glacial wind whipping the warmth from his bones. The warm, tender lover of his mother - his three silly brother, bundled together. Doing mischief. The scorn of the elders. If it was one thing that had marked him forever, it was that sense of being an outcast in your own family: that those who ought to love you, didn't. His careless way of going about life, not quite stopping to think or feel, was a product of it: if he probed too deeply, he only found tender bruises, and life with that kind of pain nagging at his mind was a lot more cumbersome to get through. But these days - he felt confused, lost, alone, and in some twisted, silly sense, abandoned. By who or what he had no idea, just that it was a hollow, bitter ache, like gall in the back of his mouth. Listless and apathetic he'd kept away from the pack, but never out of the Grove, just drifting along like a snow ghost. He fit in well, with his faint silver mottling: nearly impossible to see. It was easy to hide.


But the wind blew a scent to him that made another one-second shift in his mood: from that drifter, to a creature of rage. It smelled far too much, far too close, of loner, and tinged with blood. Jessie's scent came to him as well, a flash of anger on it - even if she'd brought a loner home, she surely wouldn't have taken it beyond the borders. She was smarter than that. So only one option remained: trespass. Memories of Mist and Kegan, who had trespassed too, flashed into his head. No questions asked, he and Marsh had relentlessly driven them out of the Grove.


He'd do the same, now.


Lips peeled back, baring bone-white teeth to the winter landscape. A growl rumbled in his chest, and waiting only a second more to make sure he'd go in the right direction, Ice sprinted off. He'd grown up on snow; it felt good to have its chill under his pads again, the unyielding click of blunt claws against ice. As he ran, he caught the sound of Jessie's challenging bark, and his own head tipped back, releasing a hoarse call for the pack: it's time to hunt. The empty, vaguely painful frustration had morphed into anger: tangible, overpowering, filling him up with heat. He didn't stop. Didn't ask questions. Blaze's crime was unforgivable: he just hoped Jessie would join in. Swift River's two remaining pups were too precious to risk to the whims of a mad loner. No longer terribly small, but inexperienced, probably no good in a real fight against a mad wolf. Howling with fury and rage, the pale beast barreled out of the surrounding trees, a flash of silver-streaked white across the carpet of snow. Teeth hungry for his flesh and blood, Ice tucked his head to protect his own throat, and flew at the loner: his right front leg moved up, to try and hook across his back, while his jaws snapped for Blaze's left eye or ear, seeking to latch on and rip his skin open.

.ice aesir