Hollowheart Keep Vademecum

They say the captain goes down with the ship

• NAIRA •

so when the world ends, will god go down with it?

Mapplethorpe’s tense mood had rubbed off on the tawny leader. Waking with a stiff ache in her hips while the moon was still high in the sky and finding her mate absent from the den yet again, the woman allowed her nose to trail over the sleeping backs of Asphodel and Hemlock before she slowly made her way from the den. As she walked, her nose tipping toward the sky and then back down to the ground until she finally found the scent she sought.

In all honesty, since the blunder of Myrrhis, she had been overly tense herself. The possibility for retribution still lingered and with the absences of both Chulyin and Sagacity they were definitely less than what they had been. Finally movement could be heard ahead and a small smile of relief dared to cross her face. The way he spoke to their children had awoken her own philology and she dared to challenge herself, convinced the cover of night would conceal her embarrassment were she to royally stuff it up. “Amor meus.” She dared to whisper to the darkness.

His restlessness was making her uneasy, but she couldn’t quite shake the feeling herself. She longed to feel the rocky safety of the Pass beneath her paws and feel the icy chill of snow touched winds blowing down from the peak of Mount Dire. She wanted to know her children were safe. All of them.

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The whisper came to attentive ears - skyward ears which were straining for any and every sound. He slowly drew closer in the direction from where Naira's lick of Latin had come from. Gratefully, she was not too far. "Cara mea," he whispered back, finding her between the gnarled and crooked trees in the dead of night. He shivered and quaked in her presence, closing his eyes as he nuzzled his face ever so gently into fur at the nape of her neck. "Naira."

Had he been afflicted with a such thing as truly human emotions, he might have cried - broken down to a point after which he could not recover. Myrrhis' terribly-timed mistake had worried him; he believed the pack to be in grave danger. Sending Myrrhis away, exiling her, only spelled out trouble, which Mapplethorpe believed meant that she would expose the wolves of Hollowheart Keep. As far as he was concerned, the woman had not been sworn into the pack. She had not been bound to the oath and the secretive ways that kept them safe. And, then, there was Karpos, who, by now, was sure to have told someone about the pack. Taking the wayward yearling into account, along with all the other disappearances of the yearlings the pack had recently lost, the Leader was undoubtedly afraid. When he thought he had had an army of upcoming Guards and Scouts, he (and Naira) no longer had them; and, he had thought that he had been betrayed.

After all, the only cubs who ever thought to see him as a father figure were the ones Naira had just brought forth - his own. Taima and the rest of her age mates had been much too old and rebellious to see him as a mentor. Not even Aponi nor Nova had loved or cared for him; even if he had helped raise them alongside their mother.

"Have you seen anything?" he continued in a hushed tone as he hesitantly withdrew from her. "Heard anything?" He quickly looked her over then, his gaunt face distorted in worry since it was rare, now more than ever, for her to call for him. "Are you all right?"