For @Kisla . Tonight is the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower, so I thought I'd include it in our thread. =) Hope that's alright! This got long, don't feel obligated to match!

What compelled him awake, Japheth couldn't say. He slept, as almost always, beneath the thick boughs of trees, and though their thick canopy made it difficult to tell dawn from dark on most mornings, he felt certain it was not yet time to rise. The temperature was still cold, and his biological clock intimated that he was not yet rested and had awoken much too soon. Yet that same infernal chronometer dictated that he should not return to sleep, no, he should not, so wide-awake and yet bleary-eyed, the tawny yearling rose, and stretched this way, then that.

No footfalls or inexplicable noises broke the silence of the heart of this woodland; only the sound of a raccoon cooing over some scrap or another off in the distance met Japheth's searching ears. Nothing was out of place as far as he could see in the dim moonlight that filtered scarcely through the leaves. The tree beneath which he slept was undisturbed from the hour in which he had lain down, and the remnants of his evening meal, an unfortunate family of voles, had not yet even been picked over by crow or owl. Something had drawn the young male from the silence of sleep, but no obvious cause could be found.

Japheth meandered uncertainly through the trees, in the direction of a stream he'd paused to drink at a few hours prior. For once, his slumber had not included dreams, or at least, none that he could recall. It was a pleasant change, for in his solitude his dreams turned most often to nightmares, and more and more lately they'd been of his mother. His thoughts turned to her now, though he had little enough memory upon which to base his reminiscing; this, perhaps more than anything, was one reason he had refused to join his father's crusades against her murderers. It was hard to desire revenge when he had so little recollection of her. Dipping his muzzle to lap at the stream, he realized that much of his sadness revolving his mother was more a sense of loss, at the life he might have had if she were still there to raise him. Of course in his imagination she was always gentle, loving, and understanding, and would have protected him from his father's wrath at all costs. Perhaps she wouldn't have been thusly, but now he'd never know, and he preferred the fantasy.

The yellow-eyed yearling straightened, his thirst quenched, and peered up at the stars through the break in the trees that the stream afforded. The night sky was clear, though an occasional cloud was strewn across the half moon, and the stars twinkled in what he imagined, in his sentimental frame of mind, to be a kindly way. Japheth had always held an interest in the stars, but he was largely self-taught, having found no likeminded wolves at Eagle Ridge. The constellation he'd always seen as a mouse was directly overhead, and so he judged it was not long past mid-night. Looking upwards, he pondered whether he ought to try and go back to sleep, or perhaps travel a bit until he was tired. He had no destination in mind, anymore; he couldn't justify leaving these woodlands as he'd been subsisting tolerably well here, but he couldn't bring himself to make the decision to join a pack. He wasn't sure that Senka's Willow Ridge was the right choice for him, and other packs, though he knew of them, were yet an unknown entity and he was too awkward, too uncertain to simply show up on the borders of each and demand their best recruiting spiel.

These thoughts were cut off entirely by the sudden streak of light that arced above him. For several moments, Japheth thought he had imagined the bead of white that bridged from treetop to treetop. Then another, angled differently and less bright, but still obviously distinct from the inky blue-black of the night sky, coursed across the heavens and Japheth knew he had not imagined it. What was this spectacle? Japheth was not a superstitious sort to believe it was anything nefarious, but his curiosity was piqued and he wished he knew someone with whom he could share the light show that played out above him. Over many minutes, he counted two, then three, and four of these streaks, and he slowly began to wander along the path of the stream in search of a clearing where he could see the sky more clearly and without the impedance of trees.