In an attempt to sneak away from the prying eyes of his younger brother Deacon, Sköll traversed about the edges of Willow Ridge, the place where he knew his siblings were absolutely not allowed. For a long while, he trailed after the pack members he usually avoided - Sorya, Xetor, Titan, and that other new member he had not yet met, Enyoti or something like that - curious (as well as nosy) as to what they were up to. It seemed they were minding their own business and doing as they were told, caching various things away, hunting, scavenging, minding the ickle little princes that were his half-siblings. Nothing interesting, for sure... That as until his sister's scent trail tugged at his nose, leading off somewhere towards the east. As swiftly as he could, he loped along her path, not even hesitating when it eventually led him to the foot of the mountain.

His ghost gray eyes lifted up towards the stony crags, but was not intimidated by the sight of them. He might not have been this far to the east before, but now that he knew that his sister could have favored the location, he made a mental note to visit more often. For all he cared, she could have found a really nice lookout point to see the whole of Willow Ridge from afar or a really neat hideout in which he could seek refuge from both their step-father and other undesirable souls.

Placing one swarthy paw onto a moderately-sized boulder, he began ascending the mountainside, his sights set on a not-too-steep stretch of uneven rock shelf that made up the typical setting of Riddle Heights. Once or twice he nearly tripped over his own willowy limbs, but once he had gotten the hang of climbing over the stony ground and learned rather quickly how to trust his footing and when to try and find a better foothold, it was all uphill from there. At least, until he spied something that did no belong against the backdrop of jagged rocks and widely spaced pine trees: Morganna.

The sun had done its best in trying to sap his energy, warming his stark black coat, and for a time it seemed to have succeeded. He took a few minutes to recoup and catch his breath; and, once he had, he skulked on over to where she was. When he was just close enough to call out to her, he jibed at her, "Wouldn't have expected to see you here... Does your mother know you're out?"

He scoffed in response to her retort, but a wry smile inched up onto his face. She was the only one who could possibly quip at him in jest or sarcasm and he could easily brush it off. Her smile though was appreciated with a tickled wrinkle of his muzzle and nose; and, when she moved to continue scouting out the unfamiliarity rocky surfaces of the Heights, he caught onto her wordless invitation as if it were a second nature to him. Step by step, he followed her, taking note of where she put her paws before advancing forward. When they had reached what had once been a glistening riverbed, he stopped, letting his age-mate go on for a while before him. Though, after sometime, she, too, stopped.

Even if he had been born with lungs a little larger than hers, he also found himself winded. It would seem that their expansive territory within the willows had done nothing for them in regards to climbing, scaling slopes, and adapting to the windy cliffs of the mountain range. His ghost gray eyes surveyed Morganna as the silence between them stretched on without single sound or word. She was the first to break it, mentioning to him that in so many words that she felt threatened - by them, and he was confident that he knew exactly whom she was referring to - and that she had no trust in any of them.

"Mmm," he sounded, simply vocalizing that he agreed to what she had said. To yaff or yelp or gripe about this particular topic would only cut to the chase and Sköll was certainly interested in what else his only sister might divulge if he dragged out their conversation sentence by sentence. "We should drive them out then," he suggested. Knowing that Asriel no longer stood in his way, the second-born relished the ability to speak his mind and flaunt his newfound confidence. Had their older brother been around, Sköll might have no brought up any kind of suggestion at all, opting to keep quiet, just as he had when he was a cub... Asriel's shadow... "I don't trust them either," he revealed, the words emitting from him like the purr of a content puma. "And, maybe, we don't have to..."

His eyes narrowed in a grimace, "Is that the only reason you've been driven all the way out here?"

Morganna mentioned that they, the pack, needed the numbers; and, for a while, her brother supposed she was right. Though, a thought surfaced soon after that, perhaps, they didn't really need them when they had three younger brothers to make up their ranks. Deacon (a Guardian of sorts in the making), Castiel (a loyal Vigilante, perhaps), and Greer (who seemed to have picked up a trick or two from Sköll, himself) were more than enough to replace the extended family currently apart of the pack - Xetor, Sorya, and... Taima. Truthfully, he had actually considered the idea of picking off the rabble - those who weren't related to the Archers by blood - believing that the ranks ought to belong to Archers, specifically those who had been brought forth by his mate or born from Morganna's womb.

"Xetor can go fuck himself," he sneered in response, smirking shortly afterwards. After years of picking up the swear words, one by one, from Angier, himself, it amused Sköll just how delightful it sounded on his tongue and in his voice. For years, he had only imagined what they had all sounded like in his head; to speak them out loud now, without a second thought, was something to be savored. "I think he will be the second to go if I can manage to claw my way to the top and get rid Angier once and for all."

His sibling seemed to be preoccupied, lifting her head to either test the air or look for something specific. She began to meander off again, as though she had been drawn forward by an invisible contraption, a puppet string that drew her away from him. As carefully as he could, the prince sauntered after her with his tail held out to aid his sense of balance on the smooth, but uneven surfaces. "You can do it, too, you know," he cooed to the back of her brownish-black head, "If Mother could do it, certainly, you can too."

The further they went, the drier the air seemed whenever he inhaled to catch his breath. It might have occurred to him that she was searching for water if they had remained at the dried up riverbed; but, the further the princess went, the more Sköll had to wonder if she had something else in mind. "Morganna, stop," as much as he wanted to yaff at her, his impatient plea lifted from him as though he were merely a cub, begging his sister to release her slobbery hold on his delicate mouse-furred ears. "Where are you even going? What are you looking for?"

"Water!" she pretty much wailed at him. Sköll couldn't help but scoff at her, even as she began to list off the things - plants - that the pack could use in the coming months. He couldn't argue with her over that; and, for once, he let her have that... the upper hand of their exchange. Though, when she looked back at him, met his eyes, he stared incredulously at her, slightly vexed that she was starting to lead him further and further away from the places he had memorized by heart. If she kept going and they somehow got themselves lost, there was no doubt in his mind that there would be hell to pay.

She told him then that she knew she could do it, trump her superiors and claim a lofty place beneath their mother in the pack hierarchy; she just wanted to have Elettra relinquish her reign in the fashion of bestowing the title of Leader to her instead of taking up Sköll's tactic of simply claiming it when he was ready. When the two of them had become quiet, he drew close to her, standing not far from her left flank. "Good for you then," he might have flatly jeered at her if his voice had not been so smooth and soft as it was. "If you won't do it, though, then I will."

With the issuing of his dare, he gave her a hint of a smirk then started walking towards where he thought his sister might continue her search, scanning the rocky heights and the crooked trees to as far as his lupine eyes could see. "If you were so thirsty," he started, not even looking at her. "Why didn't you just go to the Lagoon or the Marsh?" It had never occurred to him that his sister was one to take the tedious, harder way around a problem, being as sharp as she was. He clicked his tongue, "Water sustains plants and plants need water... with the autumn claiming it all, you should've just looked over there. Besides, just so you know, ergot only grows on flowering grasses and all the grasses are dying. So... Well, you're not going to find any." His whiskered eyebrows rose in further challenge, already expecting some sort of quip to slap him square in the face.

She mentioned Titan and Yuka, but the prince kept his cool despite the tufts of fur that had begun to stand up on his shoulders. Her sarcasm easily nibbled away at him; all he had as a comeback was a disgruntled snort. Sköll knew better than the believe his sister would ever think of binding herself to a Thorben. They were nosy, troublesome, and, most of all, irritating in how they usually foiled his evening outings. Morganna posed a rhetorical question to him regarding the hunting grounds being shared between Willow Ridge and Whisper Caverns. The Archer boy rolled his eyes with a scoff. "Not our problem," he cooed. "At least not yet..."

He made to continue onward but stopped to look back at his littermate when she paused to inspect some weird shrub - the name of it, skunkbrush, had come to mind, but he didn't bother to comment on it. It could sit there, waiting for their return on the way back home, but Sköll was not going to hold himself responsible for remembering to go back for it.

Watching her eyes rove about the landscape, he looked her over. Not much had changed, the way he saw it; the both of them might have grown a bit larger, their eyes might have changed colors, and their vocabulary definitely went well beyond "Skull" and "Ganna" and "Mama" but the brother and sister they had been since they were cubs remained. Their rivalry was still intact; in regards to Asriel, however, that part of Sköll had been put to rest, dropped for the sake of nurturing a wave of newfound confidence. Spending time with Morganna in his absence only amplified the fact that there were now only two of them left.

Something on his face softened then and a slight tilt of his head rendered his features into that of his cub-like self from only a few months ago. "Did he... say anything to you?" he asked, his words bordering on the cryptic side. By the way he had so carefully emphasized the word "he," Sköll only hoped Morganna would work out who he was referring to. For clarity's sake, without being too straightforward, he added, "Before he left..."

Only then did it occur to him that Morganna might have come this far as to search for their missing sibling. Elettra, Angier, Skana, and the rest of the pack might put it in their heads that medicinal herbs were beneficial to the pack, but something had convinced the second-born Archer that plants were not enough to bring her so far from home.