Sex: MaleAcheron's anger at having to leave bloomed into a monstrous thing with every step he took away from... home? Did it count as that yet? That pack had been choked out by a claustrophobic mess of sniveling, weakling, cowardly -- he could go on and on. No, he didn't think anything of leaving the pack. He didn't know them; if he did, he didn't like them. But his mother. He didn't know what to think about being cast aside from her. She was his weakness: the dagger that could effortlessly pierce his thorny armor. He had felt shame before, of course, but now... This was so much more than a punishment on an empty stomach for failing to catch any prey or a bop of a paw on his tender nose for saying something stupid. This was poison: curling in his veins, curdling his blood, curbing his hope. This could drown him. How could he survive without her?
He would return. He had to. She was safe; she knew how to navigate the treacherous waters of the pack's stupidity much more skillfully than he did, and she was stronger than he was, anyway -- they wouldn't hurt her. They liked her, as she had told him when they first arrived, and though he'd long since accepted that his place was not among them as she had hoped, he still trusted her words. She was ruthless, strategic, far more careful than Acheron had the patience to be. If anyone could survive, it would be her. And so his fate rested solely on his own broad shoulders. As he ran from his past, with no destination and no resources nor other wolves to help him -- it was fine, of course, he needed nothing and no one but his own wit and strength -- he came up with a plan. A goal, really. It was his: not meticulously planned nor step-by-step, but chaotic and messy and little more than a dream. (But as he ran through the night, he found his eyes fixed on a bright star before him, always so far away but seeming like maybe, if he ran fast enough, he could catch it.) He needed to be more powerful. He would train both his body and his mind. His mother had given him much to work on, luckily. He was too impatient? He would learn patience, stoicism -- he would lie not just in his words in the moment, but in his every move so that even those who thought they knew him best would be fooled. He would control the hot, impulsive rage that could so easily ruin his plans and tame it, hone it into a cold resolve that could be hidden until his wrath was practical to release. Oh, he would be feared. Just the thought of it -- of automatically taking the best bites of meat from each kill, of walking near and being immediately bowed to, of never being questioned (of finding his mother and letting her witness all of it, witness him, a sculpture of a king, their joint magnum opus, groomed to every specification she could ever dream of for her son). Just the thought of it tasted delicious, right on the tip of his tongue.
He would be perfect.
With that decided, the morning sun rose before him, warm and hazy. Fog? Whatever. It was hardly thick enough to obscure his vision, and it wasn't like he knew where he was going anyway. He snorted a little at his own little joke. It was just on the tightrope of sad and funny: he'd been without a permanent home before, of course -- living alone with his mother had been tumultuous at times -- but he'd always been able to follow in her paw-steps. But to distract from that thought, a strange... thing? (it looked like a moth's gray wing, but there was a stench to it that didn't... feel right) drifted from the sky and landed right on his nose. He puffed to send it flying to the grass and bent to look more closely at it. It was papery-thin and dark -- really, not all that interesting. Strange, but he could just move on, and he would.
Until another fell, a few feet before him. He stopped in his tracks, thoughts scrambling to try to come up with an explanation and finding none. His head whipped around, watching another. Then another. He looked up. The sky was thick with the gray fog, but he could see tiny dark flecks dancing through. It was almost like snow, except the opposite in color. His mother had said that snow was bad luck when Acheron was young, and though he was old enough now to know that all she'd meant was that the cold would be hard for them and that it was a misfortune that it came when they were still away from the pack they'd still been searching for then, he had thought all the way back then that she meant that the snow was an omen of bad luck and not the scope of it. He knew too that she didn't believe in luck or fate or any of that nonsense, and he of course didn't believe in it either. But. Maybe this would be good luck, for a change.
