Zera didn't know if she belonged here anymore. She fought against her own heartbeat and every other muscle in her body that burned to run, wheel, spin - anything - against this place. Her flesh puckered with goose bumps as the wind blew misty rain through hollow spaces in the trees. It blew like it was asking her where she'd been, why she'd left. Her eyes followed reluctant, damp steps and her breath drew short, as not to taste the rain-washed scents of her family. She didn't want to know what they'd think, what they'd say. How she was just like her mother, a wisp of infidelity, a resolute dissident. Guilt bled through the wiser parts of her brain until she had to turn back to what she'd left behind, for hopefully the last time. 

The Tainn was always told that the Bend was a promise of home. That she could tell her parents anything. That she would always be loved here. But any promise she'd ever heard was broken. Her mother once told her she'd never leave again, and now with the promise of new pups came the promise of old deception. She'd disappeared again like the tail-end of a storm, and this time Zera did as well. She'd gone to clear the western mountain range where she briefly considered the magic of exodus and the new promise of renewal. But she descended when she noticed that Greer was running too. That in itself was proof to her that the grass was not going to be greener on that unseen side of the world either. And lately she'd been wondering if the grass was ever green at all. Or if the world played some illusory trick on all young souls - if it wanted her to realize that the peak of that mountain was the epitome, the symbol of the fence. It was on that mountain that Zera found herself to be grown up but distilled in the fragile surface of that lake. She saw that all the colors of the world were drained into that liquid mirror, hiding, to surface when the right soul stared long enough to realize that life was not over - just suspended - prepared to ripple around the next penetration.

The Lost Lake was ever ready to move, flow if a channel opened, ripple if the breeze blew, and stir invisibly when the world seemed so still.

Zera only belonged  in deep immersion with the spectral woods, with the family that cared and worried about her more than she knew. Her pride belonged with the pack and her siblings, even if she hadn't met all of them yet. It was hard to tell if she'd ever really realize that her promise was not yet broken: she was not her mother, her brother, or her father.

Zera was a Tainn, and she belonged.

For some reason, that made a difference to her now as she livened her pace toward the thickening scent of her long-seen loved ones. She was eager to meet her newest siblings, forgive her mother if she had returned, speak to Darrah for the first time in months, and to embrace her troubled father once again. Zera took one deep breath before exposing herself to that infamous ancient oak which dripped with soft rainwater teardrops.

"This is it. Home."