Sex: MaleWild Rye Fields, your half-dead guest returns to life. If I messed something up or my assumptions are bad, let me know and I'll edit <3 Anyone is welcome!
you do not know who is your friend
and who is your enemy
It had been a while.
In and out of fever, of delirious dreams and hallucinations, memories coming and going, blurring; the air burning in his lungs and throat as he coughed, wet or weak or dry. His winter fur thin and matted, his sides sunken, the steel gray hairs creeping among the white on his muzzle more numerous. His eyes, vacant. Sometimes, he'd wandered out of the infirmary, stumbling into the snow and looking for redemption, but finding only a confusing vista and some Rye wolf herding him back inside.
He had already lost all sense of time and space, adrift in sickness and some kind of gut-wrenching grief. He had spoken with Death in the darkness, but in more lucid moments, probably only talked to himself. How long it had been—how long he had been there—he didn't know.
What warranted such kindness towards a relic he didn't know either, except on the days he saw Jessie's face, or remembered her finding him out on the tundra. The worry in her eyes. The pleading in her voice. The memory was fractured, splintered, slivers of a night that seemed to stretch impossibly, warp and contort as other things butted into it. Swift River; Rissa; Kisla; the mountains. Corinna. Indru. Things he hadn't thought of in a long, long time.
But as the clouds finally break after a storm, and the sun rises even after the longest night, his mind began to clear. His weak body slowly healed. Bit by bit, he put the pieces back together: he was Ice, of Oak Tree Bend, the father who always abandoned. He had gone to Hearthwood River, and learned of Kisla's death. He had begun to head back home, but he'd never made it. His memories were a haze of different locations, of going in circles—even looking for Ava in Darkwater Rapids—of his lungs burning up, and of stumbling through snow, paws freezing, ears freezing, soul freezing. The mountain range, always the mountain range, until the tundra. Until Jessie.
Slowly, the old wolf hauled himself out of the infirmary den he'd been deposited in. A pale late winter sun shone from low in the blue sky, touching his face with gentle rays, as if whispering a welcome, acceptance of Ice's return to the world of the living. He blinked his silver eyes, a weak, but dry, cough rattling his thin body. A blanket of snow rolling down to the uneven horizon, the vibrant rye fields sleeping under its winter blanket. Ice's nostril's flared. How long had he been lost? How long had he been ill?
Did Serach know? About Kisla? About him? Did he think him a coward, who had run; or did he worry, because he knew of Ice's age? Did he hate, for having gone missing again, or did he have it in him to forgive?
Slowly, Ice went forward, stumbling a little, but he made it to the brook. Beneath the thin ice, water bubbled, and weakly, the large wolf let a paw fall on it until it broke. He bent his head and drank, mind heavy with the knowledge that he wasn't in the clear yet. Tomorrow, day after, he'd be lost in the haze again, but he came out of it more often than he had.
![[Image: gXwwdmt.png]](http://i.imgur.com/gXwwdmt.png)