This wretched season had quickly come to be even worse than the blight that had been Winter, yet Sven could not truly place why. There were plenty of reason, but there was a core to them that could not be described by the naive youth. He had suspicions, the primal knowledge base within him feeding him clues enough, but nothing was known. All he knew was that his aunt @Morganna was consistently absent and smelled of strange men upon each return, and that she and the other females carried a worrisome change of scent that simultaneously piqued his curiosity and thoroughly revolted him. Even Hecate had donned the poisonous perfume, and Sven had simply learned to avoid the lot of them altogether.

Still, he crossed paths, and sometimes was sought out, which he would not avoid. Occasionally he would lift his nose and allow a toothy scowl to pass his lips, making his disdain evident, but a word was never spoken on the matter.

Then something changed.

For days he had been considering the options, attempting to convince himself that what his instincts told him were the facts had to be utterly wrong. The longer the turmoil existed solely within his mind, however, the more difficult it became to ignore, until finally the Archer heir knew he had no choice but to confront the problem head on. So he sought out Hecate, the woman who held an unallowable amount of his father's musk upon her along with something else lowkey and sinister.

He sought her out, easily tracking her down, and without ceremony voiced one single line once she was within earshot, every bit an accusation.

"You fucking reek."

He watched her every movement, each tiny ripple of her muscles, swivel of her ears and twitch of her whiskers from the moment those words left his mouth. Searching for any and all answers that she might not be willing to speak aloud. His ears were lowered but swiveled forward, planed out to the side of his skull, while his gray eyes narrowed dangerously. Her steps ceased, but his continued, bringing him closer. Why wasn't she turning to look at him? His ire mounted, but still there was a small flame of hope that his suspicions were entirely uncalled for.

Her response utterly doused it. Did yer figure it out? His lip pulled upward at a creeping pace, showing his fangs in a lopsided sneer. Then she had been hiding something from him. One of the few not of his blood that he had allowed himself to trust, even to be vulnerable to. Yet he kept wishing within his heart that whatever this dirty secret was, it did not have as much to do with his father as he feared.

"Yes. Every one of you god damn stinks, my aunt can't fuckin' stay home, and if I catch @Wraith snivelin' up to her one more time I'm gonna put him in the ground," he hissed, his hackles creeping slowly skyward as speaking aloud all that unnerved him edged him closer to boiling over. "So what's the dirty secret, Hecate? What did you do?"

Say it, his molten silver gaze demanded. At this point, he didn't care about the details surrounding all of it. He wanted her story alone, her sins laid bare. The rest he would take to someone he could trust.

Her rumbling growl laced the air thinly, but it only encouraged his own frustrations to the surface of his being. This wasn't the Hecate he knew, aloof and flippant; not even the one he had stumbled upon with tears on her face in the middle of a fog-ridden night. This was the Hecate that finally was backed far enough in a corner to become defensive, and it only proved to him further that she had done something very, very wrong. If only she would just speak it.

Why, she told him he would someday. Sven bared his fangs as a snarl leaked from betwixt them, eyes widening as his rage expanded suddenly. If there was any logic at all to why their pack mates were such shit, why the hell couldn't she deign to tell him now? Why was it someday, as though he were somehow unworthy of an explanation? He'd never been given one, always the problems had been throw onto his mother's figurative carcass, crushing her further and further into the ground. It didn't matter how far away she ran, she had always been the scapegoat so that the others didn't have to confess their own faults in why this place such hell.

"Like what?" he snapped, stepping forward as she finally turned to face what she had done to him. It wasn't a question he actually needed answered, he was all too familiar with the negative traits the adults around him bore. "Selfish? Disloyal?"

She wasn't speaking, she was buying time, and each second further of her silence killed him. His throat constricted as his eyes began to burn with moisture he refused to shed.

"God fucking dammit, 'Cate, just tell me!" he all but screamed.

She rose to his level and perhaps even beyond, unleashing a voice even more deeply cracked with emotion and frustration than his adolescent shouting. He bristled and instinctively his body morphed with signs that preluded physical violence, his tail curling just before the tip and his chin tucking down over his throat. His pure features grew uglier as they twisted with rage, because everything that she was shrieking at him made no goddamn sense. She said that he should know why wolves hurt those they love, and for a moment he saw red as he thought perhaps she was, just as had been done so many times by so many others, trying to put the focus and the blame back onto his mother.

Then she said it, and the roaring of the flames within him were suddenly silenced. In shock, his body released; his eyes widening and jaw falling slack. She closed the distance between them, stood as tall as her spine would allow her, and he leaned back, not of mind in that instant to rise to her anger. Initially, he could feel nearly nothing.

Then he realized that in such a purposefully indirect way, she had tried to tell him that she loved him.

The tears began to fall, matching hers for volume, and the rage returned with such a strength that it began to shake him. His eyes trailed down from her face to between her shoulders, where somewhere buried deep beneath her muscle and between her organs a bastard sibling was brewing. The boy's breathing grew heavier as every single implication of this forming life impaled him like daggers within his back, and he considered how many chomps it might take to cut through her flesh and extinguish it entirely. It was a thought too savory to entirely dismiss, and his frustrations were made apparent when he suddenly rose to his full height and snapped his jaws at her face.

"You fucking whore!" he screamed. "You're the reason why! You're why he fucking gave up! You killed her! You fucking killed my mother!"

They could have saved her, he and @Skoll. Sven could have had his family back. Instead, this snake had infiltrated his family and stolen his father's loyalty. It all made perfect sense now within his head. Hecate's selfish affair had damned his hopes of ever getting his mother back.

She continued the pattern of screaming, and with each and every word he saw deeper shades of red that he never imagined to be possible. His entire body was lit to heights of brutal energy, his paws kneaded the ground as his jaws remained parted like a waiting alligator, something between a hiss and a growl leaking from his throat. Again she was turning this around, trying to lessen her own blame in the ordeal, glossing over the roots of the problem. Did she really believe this could be fixed, that words could smooth it all over?

It took more willpower than he had ever had to express to hold himself back from attacking her outright. His mind raced ahead of him, vividly fantasizing about overpowering her and forcing her to the ground. Tearing her throat open to drain every last ounce of blood from her body, to leave her gasping as she bled out and knowing that the child within her would wither and die at an even more agonizingly slow pace. He wanted them both dead, and he knew that his restraint would not last the longer he stared into those poisonous beryl eyes.

"The decision to abandon his wife for something far easier," he hissed at last, tail whipping through the air behind him, in response to the 'choices' Hecate said Skoll was old enough to make. "Next year will just be the same damn show, but you'll be playing Piety's part, and that fucking thing inside of you? Take a good look at what it'll be."

He was done with her, done with the words and the tears; his own eyes were beginning to dry already. He needed to find his father. Hecate had turned herself into a tool, opened the door for Skoll, but she was right about that; it had been his own damn choice to walk over the threshold. He was at the heart of it all, and Sven wanted to bleed the arteries dry.

Sven attempted at that point to brush past the woman, and onto his next target.