Round Stone Crest Wipe out the past and wash me clean off the slate

ooc: @Gent dated 10-24-15, midday, sunny and 40°F.

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The snow from two days before was beginning to melt away as the autumn sun made its milky reappearance through the clouds; where nearly all the ground had been covered in a blanket of white, now only small piles of slush remained here and there, most gathered around the bases of larger trees that kept the brightest and warmest sunlight at bay with their outstretched limbs and what gatherings of tremulous leaves remained firmly attached to the boughs.

Calanthe didn't grieve the snowmelt; there would be more, and it would pile even higher and pack itself down more densely with its own weight. Better to enjoy what warmth remained before clouds and frigid wind overtook the skies for good. The snows would bring thinner, more difficult hunting and colder dens; winter storms might change their territory so radically that new hunting spots and patrol routes would need to be decided upon come Spring. For now she enjoyed the calm that came before the storms.

She was using it to her advantage, as well, and wandering the territory in another attempt to press every last shrub and stone into her memory. If she scented prey, she would take it, but this was more of an internal scouting mission - her heart twisted at the thought. Kenelm would have teased her for this, told her learning the layout as it was would never prepare her for the way it would be... She shook herself away from that thought with an angry snort and nearly stumbled into a very tall, very wide, certainly very old tree. She only just swerved away in time to walk past it, crossing as she did beneath the fallen body of a younger tree, taken down by rot and a strong wind or four and propped in the arms of its senior.

For a moment Calanthe paused and took in the sight; there was something very poignant about it, something soft and silent and still heartwrenching to look at. The pale woman sat quietly down, her eyes unable to stray from the two trees - at least until her forepaw brushed against something small and thin on the ground in front of her. It didn't feel like any twig, but it was too big to be a needle... with a frown, the woman looked down to see what in the world she had touched - and jumped away with a shriek.

The thing was a dead centipede - innocuous to any other wolf, surely, but to a wolf who had soaked up the teachings of the Gambol wolves as diligently as Calanthe had the little carcass was as good as a death knell. Centipedes, she had been taught, were beloved to the capricious nameless spirit, the one responsible for all twists and turns of fortune in life, who chose no sides but aided or hindered all without bias... except when a wolf came across a dead centipede. The spirit asked no questions; it was too impatient for that. A wolf it found hovering over the body of a dead centipede was a wolf cursed to the most horrific forms of bad luck imaginable. And if the spirit hadn't noticed Calanthe's error before, she had just drawn its attention with her screaming.

For a moment she could do little else but stare at the centipede, half willing the thing to go away, to disappear, to wake up and start crawling away so that she - and the spirit - could know that the stupid thing... er, the poor, unfortunate little creature was only asleep, only pretending, and so there was really no reason for the spirit to punish Calanthe at all - certainly not with any fires or hurricanes or floods or outbreaks of incurable disease or long, rocky drops off the steepest area of the mountain... But no, of course it didn't get up and move. Of course it didn't. That would be too wretched simple, wouldn't it? That would be lucky, when clearly Calanthe was not a woman who courted luck in any form.

Maybe the centipede wasn't bad luck. Maybe that was just a... a... a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Or superstition. Whichever. Maybe if she just brushed it off and pretended nothing was the matter, it would turn out that nothing bad at all would happen to her. She backed away, her manic smile more of a grimace as she tried to console herself with the idea. Kenelm had run afoul of Malkhaz after finding a dead centipede, but that wasn't the spirit's work. Kenelm was always in trouble with the pack leadership. Finding the centipede had been a coincidence--

In her badly-stifled hysteria, Calanthe didn't take the time to look behind her. Her back paw fumbled across a raised root, and she couldn't recover her balance quickly enough to keep from tumbling into a heap with a startled yelp.

The king was frozen in his steps as a cry ricocheted throughout his forest, entering his ears like a hollowpoint bullet. A soundless snarl twisted his snout as he swiveled quickly round on his heels and darted in the direction from which it came. All of his senses honed in on the origin, seeking for any predication of what was wrong so that he may have the upper paw on it. Surely, something terrible had befallen his pack mate for her to make such a sound, and his mind ran rampant with dark imaginings as he was unable to capture any clues within the air.

When he barreled unto the scene, his eyes locked upon Calanthe who was on the ground in an awkward position, but otherwise seemingly unharmed. There was no blood upon the wind, no scent of another neither foreign nor familiar, no predators, not even prey. Incredulous, the king surveyed the area around him with his glacial eyes as though his nose were deceiving him, but was forced to give up. There was nothing here except a horrified looking Calanthe. Was she having nightmares again? What an odd place to slumber...

"What's wrong?" his thundering voice demanded to know. The king's nerves were too far frayed to be able to tolerate this unknowing any longer. And if something was escaping his detection, he wanted to be sure to eliminate it as swiftly as possible.

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The King's voice was nearly enough to startle Calanthe out of her panic - the tawny woman hadn't heard or smelled him approaching at all - but even then it took her several moments to collect herself enough that she could voice an answer coherent enough that Gent would understand if not accept it. Her eyes would not tear themselves away from the dead centipede, not even as the rest of her body turned towards Gent and lowered in difference to him. The bug's remains might as well have been the center of the universe, a dark, all-consuming center that set the air around them humming like the lowest notes of an epicedium.

"It's... that - that thing," she finally managed to grate out. Her voice had a hysterical edge to it, quivering as she fought to calm herself down. "That centipede - it's worse than bad luck finding one. Wolves died finding them before - violent deaths, horrible deaths. The Gambol—" Her voice gave out for an instant; when she spoke again, her voice was hoarse and hollow with guilt. "I found one before. We burned that same week." She raised a fearful gaze to Gent and added, "And now... Now... I've found another one."

She turned toward him, and yet her eyes continued to be frozen to the ground with absolute horror shining brightly within them. He followed their gaze, expecting to witness something most gruesome, but instead he saw nothing. The tiny corpse was so irrelevant within the king's mind that it didn't even register as being there until she named it. Gent stepped closer, coriaceous nose twitching madly as he tried to discern what exactly was so horridly wrong with the insect, and yet found himself swiftly losing focus with each word his subordinate simpered out.

His glacial gaze turned to Calanthe, disbelief scrawled across his entire visage as he regarded her carefully, wondering if this was all some terrible joke or if she had lost her mind. Once she was finished, shivering with such fear, he could only ask again, "... what?"

It had to be the latter. It better be the latter, he thought grimly. If she thought this was funny... but there was no humor within the situation at all, and he knew she couldn't be that good of an actress. No, Calanthe truly believed that an insect's death was a harbinger of their doom. Gent scoffed, shaking his head, before slamming his paw down upon the centipede's lifeless shell.

"Calanthe. Its just a dead bug, dammit."

A lynx has left behind the remains of a deer. +5 Health

The sound of Gent's paw landing on the centipede's body might as well have been a crack of thunder right next to Calanthe's ear. The tawny woman yelped and jumped back, eyes growing even wider still as Gent crushed the tiny carcass. What was he doing? Hadn't he just heard what she'd told him? That was bad luck! That was a death sentence! Someone - something - would see, and all hell would rain down on their pack because of it!

He still didn't understand. That must be it; he must think it was a joke, that she was only wasting his time. She had to make him understand.

"It's not just a dead bug," she told him, voice still shaking hard. "Gent, listen to me. My old pack all learned it from birth - we saw proof of it when I was young. Wolves who found dead ones - or who killed them - died themselves. There was a princess who died minutes after finding one; she was ripped apart by a mountain cat, and the centipede was nearby. @Kenelm—" she winced; uttering her brother's name tore savagely at her. "My brother found one when I was little. It wasn't more than a week later that he and the prince fought - they drew blood, Gent, and they had never done that to each other before. Kenelm's ear was ripped, and he almost lost an eye, and no one in the pack trusted him afterwards even though he lost the fight and that always settled things before—"

She ran out of words to say, and stood staring at Gent. Maybe this was her bad luck. Maybe finding that centipede was going to lead to her expulsion from the Crest - would she believe something like this if it came from another wolf whose beliefs were not her own? Maybe Gent thought she was crazy, and maybe she had just confirmed it for him, and perhaps he was going to be the last pack mate she ever got to speak to on the Crest's land before she was chased away. At least, if the centipede had brought all that about, she had attempted to get the warning out; maybe the spirit would be satisfied with her misery, and leave her new family alone.

She continued to plead with him, spewing forth a wealth of words meant to persuade him that something so insignificant as the death of an insect could mean so much for them. He bought not a single word, in fact her stories seemed to convince the king that rather than serving as valid proof of her superstitions, it all pointed toward a much more sinister and dangerous fact. Great, he thought to himself. She'd come from a cult. One might think that possessing a pack mate of such molded mind might be beneficial to the king, but he saw it only as a large risk.

"Who enforced this curse, Calanthe?" he asked, skepticism seeping into his voice like poison. He was forced to hold his anger back, willing to try and rationalize with her first, but his mind ran faster than he could. What if she had spoken any of this filth to the others, to his children? He thought of Draven, how close he had grown to be to the woman before him, and the thought of the boy, his boy, being raised to fear an insect lit a fire within him.

"Some god? The centipedes themselves? Or your leaders?" To him, only the latter was logical. Even if it was a wrong assumption, however, he would rather her be convinced of that than any sort of nonsense as she currently was.

Gent's anger was becoming a palpable thing, and caught in its path, there was little else for Calanthe to do but bow her head and squeeze her eyes shut against the tears that blurred her vision. He didn't believe her. He didn't understand, and she wasn't making him understand. He was going to kick her out. He was never going to trust her again, never going to look at her as a friend, never going to look at her as anything more than a nuisance, a weak link the pack couldn't afford to baby—

His question slammed into her with all the force of a mountain coming down on top of her, and in her shock all she could do was gape speechlessly up at him for a long, long moment. Her leaders? Her former King and Queen? Gent couldn't possibly be suggesting... He couldn't mean... They wouldn't. It wasn't possible!

"The royal family protected us!" she said, her voice louder and sharper than she intended. "They taught us the danger to keep us safe from the nameless spirit! You can't be saying they were making it up—and if you are, that... that isn't possible!" She shook her head, trying to clear it, but chaos and dark, ugly suspicion had come to gourmandize her mind, destroying what clarity there might have been before.

"They wouldn't do that to us," she insisted again. "They weren't like that. They were... They helped teach us. They helped defend the pack. The Queen taught us all how to scent track, Gent, and taught us rhymes and songs..." She shook her head again and let out a long, shrill whine. "Malkhaz was... was cold, and he didn't like my brother, but he wouldn't... And the King even helped look for me once when I wandered off... They couldn't have..."

Could they? Kenelm was always at odds with Malkhaz. The princess was one known to bicker publicly with the King. The fire had come during a hot summer, and mistakes always happened even without the centipedes, and... and...

She crumbled to the ground; her legs were shaking far too much to bear her weight anymore, and the implications Gent had given voice to were heavier than all the world across her shoulders. The pack she had served, mislead by their own rulers? The royal family she had always dreamed of serving all her life... liars? Those who had been hurt and killed nothing more than sacrifices to strengthen the façade?

"It can't be true..."

She roared back at him, clearly outraged by the proposition, and yet he stood as still and formidable as a steep rock cliff. Eyes as cold as the arctic ice they had been cut from bore down on her as she worked out the possibility both vocally and behind those frantic, searching yellow pools. Nameless spirit, so that's what supposedly was such a large fan of centipedes that it struck down those who not even harmed them, but happened upon their emptied husks? A snort of disbelief issued from his nares.

To him, this was a ridiculous conversation. Yet it was also important that Calanthe did not perpetuate these beliefs. It seemed that to convince her of such, however, would be to complete unravel her world, as was evident by her speech and posture. As Gent stared down at her, he began to realize that perhaps he did not have the emotional tact to properly handle the situation. Perhaps @Raela should be called upon; she seemed always to know exactly what to say. And yet he did not move to call her. Recalling the situation with Urien, a small part of him feared that perhaps she would not recognize the danger of Calanthe's odd religion. He could still try further, he supposed.

"Then what else could be true, Calanthe? I can tell you right now there is no spirit, certainly not one that gives a damn about an insect," he told her, his voice no less firm. Perhaps he should have been gentler with her, but again that was Raela's vocation, not his. "I've heard of packs like that before. Cults. For whatever reason, the leaders makeup preposterous beliefs such as that and enforce them in order to control their subordinates. That's reality. This?," he lifted his paw, the carcass tossed in the air briefly by the momentum, "is not."

Calanthe cringed away from Gent and the scorching rebuttal that came forth from him. Control them? The Queen had been as good as a second pup sitter for them! She had treated them all like her own children, even Kenelm - even Kenelm after that last awful fight he had had with Malkhaz! That couldn't be the truth! It couldn't be! If it was...

"Their own daughter was killed," she mumbled, staring stupidly at the ground as her mind traveled back through her life in the Gambol. "There was a centipede next to her body, a dry, dead centipede, and it was a cat that killed her..." But Malkhaz had egged Kenelm on before their fight - had been short with him even before Kenelm found his centipede carcass. The fire had come after a dry summer when the trees had cracked with the heat. And mountain cats were always a danger around the Gambol, and who was it that most frequently preached the danger of harming centipedes? Who was it that always started the whispers about the spirit getting Its revenge once the unlucky wolf had been punished?

"They didn't need to lie to us." She was grasping, now, scrabbling at whatever stayed afloat in the torrent of emotion that Gent had let loose. "We were already loyal to them. They raised us to love them - to love each other like family, and look after each other. They didn't need to control us..." Again she shook her head, whining helplessly as she stuck to that final, lifesaving thought. They didn't need to. They didn't need to. They loved their pack, and they knew they were loved back, and they didn't need to lie to earn that love.