you do not know who is your friend

and who is your enemy

(Life is a blur and you're nothing but one streak of color in it—)


Forget, forget, forget, his mind kept repeating in the darkness, a mantra devised to prevent exactly what it spelled out: forget, forget, forget, bury your thoughts in five thousand feet of sand and gravel and bones. The mountain's spine loomed to his right, a tall, black, bony ridge where each vertebra jutted out like the back of some slumbering dragon. Beyond its jagged peaks glittered stars, so distant, so beautiful, cold and legion and never alone. Their fallen kin, the thin layer of snow crisp under his paws, did its best to glitter, too, as if the world had reversed and the stars were fallen to the ground.


And maybe they were, Ice thought as he jogged on through the murky predawn light, for what did wolves truly know of stars? His silver eyes glanced upwards again, at the lone arc of a moon, forget, forget, forget.


He didn't want to forget, not even as his paws slowed their motion to a tentative halt upon the slopes of the mountain; he said it only because it was easier, a single word to repeat like a prayer. What it meant was 'don't think because it'll hurt'. He didn't have the resources to waste on a frantic, anxious heartbeat when he still had so many miles to travel, so much ground to cover, so many fears to bury and hopes to cage.


Ice couldn't afford to hope. Ice wouldn't have forgiven Indru had he returned. Ice wouldn't have forgiven himself—hadn't, no matter how intimately he knew the circumstances of his own disappearance. Hope, for Oak Tree Bend to still prosper, for their forgiveness, for Corinna's forgiveness—it was all a lie, a fairytale, a soft cushion around a fragile glass heart, but it would still break when dropped. He would rather be prepared for rejection. Death. He knew, after all, how brief and brittle life could be, and it brought a bitter exhale from his dark mouth. It came out like a white cloud, star-illuminated smoke rising towards the distant navy sky. "Forget," he whispered in the same bitter voice, deep in the darkness, as his aching paws shuffled along the snow-covered rocks, but still he didn't move. He knew how easy it was to forget, too; all you needed was a blow to the head.


His heart ached. His heart was shut, too full of pain to open up and risk more. Ice blinked in the pallid light, and glanced up at the mountain peak. For so long it had lain like a bulwark against evil, a steady, comforting presence to lean back against—it had cradled the Grove, but on the other side. On this side.. here, they had fled to forget Indru, and to chase the ghost of Rissa.


An owl swept past on silent wings. Thin blades of browned, dry grass waved in the night wind.


Ice caved in and turned ninety degrees to the east, going where he hadn't dared to go before.

---

Early sunlight filtered down through mostly naked branches, and fell upon his pale, broad back. The sky was devoid of clouds, nothing but a pastel blue cover drawn across the world, and the first rays of sun hadn't fallen past the Dire's shadow for more than fifteen minutes—it was cold, winter was well on its way, and just like the last time he had followed this exact path, he was tired and hungry. The void in his gut gnawed at him, but desperation and determination drove him forward. That tree there, that bush, this turn, a little further, here's where Fenru spiraled off in another direction, those rocks really don't look like I thought they did, Jessie's howl caught me here— (All he does is forget what he's afraid of.)


And all of a sudden, with the sun warming his back, he found himself where he had found himself then, in a small clearing in a red forest. Bare trees stretched their twisted hands to the cloudless sky, but it looked so different in the daylight—harmless, even, not at all the scene of grisly murder of someone way too young.


Ice's heart stumbled in his chest. Here, now, the memories couldn't overlap—they just weren't the same. He wasn't the same. The only thing he could conjure was Fenru and Rissa playing here, which they had never done, but he could still see it. The snow hadn't yet fallen thick enough to obscure the features of the place—had barely fallen at all. Dark leaves clung to tall bushes, and a few, white flowers still sat upon their branches. Sunlight glittered along their frosty edges, and Ice's breath pooled into the reverent silent. Once, twice, thrice—five minutes, ten, as he simply stood there and let the old pain wash through him.


One smoky breath came out different.


"Rissa."

you do not know who is your friend

and who is your enemy

He expected his sunlit breath to dissipate in silence, with not even the echo of the name to hush softly in his ears.


He thought he would be alone, caught in his own moment, a creature in a snow-globe and the world simply passing him by. Grief was a private thing, slow and crystalline that morning, like tears frozen on eyelashes and sparkling gently in the sunlight. But with no grave marker, no sign of what had transpired; how could anyone know? What, aside from a nightmarish find burned into the minds of three wolves, marked this glade as different from any other glade?


Maybe it was his stillness that had drawn her in, the way he had frozen all the way to his heart as his tired mind tried to make sense of a chain of actions tangled into a knot; what role had he played in what had transpired here?


His breath glittered in the air.


"H-how d'you know that name?" (So the ghosts can speak after all—) He was tired, too tired to start at the sudden voice voicing a question he didn't know how to respond to; because I could've been her father? Because he had found her desecrated corpse in this very glade? His pale ears strained forward as his head turned, silver gaze falling on the source of the breathless voice. She stood out like a sore thumb, a misplaced wolf-shaped log, and only the red-brown of the ferns peeking up through the cover of snow redeemed her. He felt like grunting, but the magic of the moment gripped him still, silencing the noise.


"What's it to you?" he said instead of answering. It was like being haunted by Aiyana and Rissa all at once, a sun-bleached kind of ghost asking about her sister, Tainn gold eyes and all. Ice didn't know what to make of it. Who had known the girl, aside from her pack, and her murderers?


And she was neither—she looked younger than Rissa would've been today had she lived.

you do not know who is your friend

and who is your enemy

The sun slanting in on the scene made it seem unreal—like a memory of a memory, the echo of a storm. It ran golden hands along frost-covered branches and flowers, lit up the wolves' smoking breaths, and banished shadows. It was hard to conjure up the image of rime-ice on a skull glowing silver in the moonlight, dried blood black as pitch staining gray fur. "Uhm, well..." the young female began, and Ice found his eyes straying from her and back to the point where he was so sure Rissa had fallen. Things seemed so much more different in daytime, but it was the right distance from where he stood, wasn't it?


She went on, in the rambling kind of way of someone certain of what to say, but uncertain of which words to use; the corners of his mouth began to turn up, but the expression froze before he got very far.


Tainn gold eyes. It hadn't just been his imagination, the location bringing out the memory of those golden-yellow eyes staring at him from countless faces. Rissa had been her cousin. So who did that make her father? Who did he have to choose from? Ruiko, Triell, and hadn't there been someone called Kinis? Kinis, who had gone missing from Copper Rock Creek—Kinis, who had been Triell's littermate and close friend...


His breath rose in front of his face. It came out in a low whoosh, because he hadn't realized he'd been holding it. Not that you ever met her, no... Silver eyes blinked and large paws carried him further into the glade, stepping reverently on the desecrated ground. (—you were born on this side of the mountains—) And that thought felt so important somehow, but he couldn't put his paw on it until he stared down at his white feet buried in the thin cover of snow (—a child of Oak Tree Bend). It was here that Rissa had fallen—it was here that he had kissed her goodbye for the last time, when she was already dead and cold. He had been too late to comfort her in her final hours, and what terror she must've endured before her savaged body gave up on life...


"Did you know her?" "Yeah," he breathed.


The silence lingered, but Ice didn't notice—she could've left and he wouldn't have noticed, too lost in a night nearly four years gone.


Her question broke it, snapped him out of his thoughts; he blinked, raised his head, and looked at her again. He could see the Tainn blood in her, too obvious for him to ignore, but really, what good had ever come of the Tainns..? Look at Indru, leaving with Torrel and Rihael; look at Rissa, not even a bone left under the snow to remember her by; look at Aiyana, who had left with Borden... That left Triell and Ruiko, then Kisla and Fenru, both worn down, and hadn't Fenru taken the name Donata instead..? Ice almost wanted to tell her to change her name, but then again, she hadn't called herself a Tainn yet. He chose to answer her instead.


"I'm Ice." He looked down again, at the undisturbed snow. Raised a paw, and lightly put it down half a foot ahead. "She died here."

you do not know who is your friend

and who is your enemy

And maybe that was what the sunlight was trying to tell him, as it fell with soft gentleness on the snow-covered glade: move on. Things change. Let go of Rissa in your heart; stop holding her so tightly, and let her dance with the dust motes and snowflakes as they spiral softly in the light. Her death had come to decide so much in his life, overshadowed so much, eclipsed joy, and hung above him like a failure he couldn't shake. He hadn't ever gone back to this place, hadn't even meant to while he still lived here. It had been a wound too recent, still bleeding, still hurting, but now as he stood there with his breath pooling into the sunshine, it was just a scar.


Relic Lore had moved on. It had mourned its fallen daughter, its pristine white flowers in full bloom beneath the summer sun and lingering now, as if the forest itself had known that he would come—and had known that he would've needed the consolation. Some sort of affirmation that she was gone, grieved for, done with but never forgotten, always loved.


In the dark winter night when his deepest fear had been realized, he hadn't been able to guess at the beauty of her final resting place. And now, it made his throat close, his heart ache, and his eyes glisten with unshed tears.


"Right here?" Rissa's young cousin asked, probably staring at him or the spot where his large paw met the previously untouched snow. Hoping she saw, he simply nodded, not trusting his frail voice to carry, or to even work at all; the back of his throat felt hot and raw, as if something was swelling in his gullet, full of sharp edges. He blinked, not once, but two, three, four, five times, then stopped, and wondered if he did the right thing; maybe, he shouldn't hold it in. Maybe, he should let go of the grief, in the same way that he needed to let go of her.


Her, and everything else that had changed in his absence; his memory had become frozen in time, and the world had passed him by. Three years was far too long to come back and pick up where he left off.


Slowly, as he listened to the Tainn-eyed girl speak, he relaxed his frantic grip on everything that had transpired, and culminated with the macabre find in this glade—everything, from Marsh's worried pacing, Aiyana's fruitless tracking of her sister, Fenru's hopelessness.. and at long last, Rissa's violent, much too early death. In the sunlight, his tears shimmered as they fell silently down his pale cheeks.


"Kisla. Fenru," he said, quietly, his voice a tad thicker than it had been moments previous. He blinked, not to keep the sorrow at bay, but to be able to see her more clearly as he turned his head to look at her. He had wanted to find them both at Oak Tree Bend, along with Serach and Sceral, Corinna and Triell, Jessie, maybe even Cali—but in his heart, he knew that it was nothing but a fool's hope, a fool's dreams. And her father—who was her father? Who could it be, but Triell? No other one of the original Tainn males had known Rissa.


"She was taken here," he said after a moment, letting his gaze slide off the dark brown girl again, and back to the frost-covered flowers lining the clearing. "And her death was not kind. She was a joyful creature, always loud, always happy, she could talk for hours and hours and her sister would just smile and listen.. Rissa always seemed to be the one to get them into trouble, but Aiyana never minded, and it was never bad.. then one day, Marsh noticed both of them had left the Sacred Grove. A couple of days later, Aiyana came back alone, because she had lost Rissa's trail."


He gave his head a small shake; the tears had stopped falling, but glistened still in his fur. "It took our best tracker to find the trail, and it led across the mountain, to this place, where we found her. Savaged, laid out on the snow in the moonlight. We.. we took our revenge, after that. We found the bastards who did it, and killed them." (Something in his heart stumbled—) "But one of them escaped, and.. and he took Marsh."


And by extension, me.


The air felt cold in his lungs, and he wondered, briefly, about the wisdom of telling of Rissa to a wolf not yet having reached her second birthday—but the words had wanted to come out, and something told him this stranger had a right to know. Slowly, he turned her back on Rissa's final resting place, and turned the full focus of his silver eyes on the young Tainn.


"You're Triell's daughter," he simply said.

you do not know who is your friend

and who is your enemy

Everything ends.


Tears dry. Hearts bleed out. Mourning is like a spring flood, violent and overwhelming, until there is no more snowmelt and it calms.


It made him feel empty, like everything had been spent, taken out of him. He had been tired even when he veered off to come here, but now, when the grief released its most vicious hold, he was exhausted. It sat like lead weights in his bones, pushed against his mind and slowly narrowed the scope of his consciousness until he almost got a headache from it. If he pushed on, he would become bitter and cantankerous, and following even the simplest thread of logic needed a fight from him. Ice didn't like living like that.


He blinked again, suddenly not at all sure of what to do anymore. He felt spent, as if his moment in time had come, and passed—and now, he was just stood there, lost, in the presence of his old friend's child. What does one say? What does one do? Should he ask her to take him back to Oak Tree Bend with her? Was Oak Tree Bend still around? She smelled as if she'd stepped out of his memories, but the idea of following her to their core, right now, made him want to start crying again.


"I think she'd like that," he responded quietly, looking at the peaceful white flowers again. "I think she'd be very sad if she thought she was forgotten. Besides.. this place isn't half as horrible-looking as I thought it would be." His paws shuffled in the snow again. While her bones had since long sunk into the earth, or been scavenged by playful coyotes and foxes, he still didn't want to step on the spot where she had died. "I.. don't know what we could call it, though. I think she'd like if her name was in it, so it was her place well and truly, and not just some vague metaphor no one understands." He frowned slightly. It felt strange talking about someone dead as if they were still alive to give a damn. If anything, they did this for themselves, to cherish a memory, to feel better about something they could no longer change...


They had cared when Rissa was alive, too. He supposed naming this place after her was just proof that he still cared even after she was dead. "I suppose we could just call it Rissa's Rest, as it's what it is."


He drew a deep breath of cold winter day air. And that was that.