Timeline: Current; approaching the end of summer
Point of View: Aleu
"Look at me!"
The birds' feathers were ruffled in every manner to speak of. When Aleu bellowed her command across the muddy stream, most took to the skies, a chorus of squawks, chirps, and the agitated clicking of beaks fading with their silhouettes in the distance. Some would return, but for those who did not, Aleu was unlikely to find them again. What awaited her farther than the boundaries of Right Here and Back There was a mystery she needn't concern herself with quite yet. Not until she made progress... or until she was deterred from it.
The stagnancy was the worst of all things. The isolation, second only to that. Aleu had always assumed herself a loner, though not by definition of being without pack. Her aversion toward strangers, her reluctance for small talk, and some degree of obligation to keep herself away from distractions. This was what made her alone.
All paths led to nowhere. All theories, disproved. Every attempt to solve her father's dilemma equaled nothing more than another stalemate with this disease. It was as though it were taunting her, intentionally bringing him back to the brink of coherency, only to have him linger there a day or two before his mind dilapidated again.
She was not an impetuous wolf, but she had made rash decisions. Nor was she cruel, and yet, she had blood on her paws that was not that of prey. This can't all be for nothing, she would swear to herself. All of this can't be for nothing.
"Look at me!" she screamed again. A part of her wondered when this had stopped being about love and become a matter of justification.
The morning was still new, the fog from the rains only now starting to clear. Taeb meandered around freely, his fur brittle and slovenly, his breath a wheeze of in and out, out and in, until it was a dolorous melody no less foreboding than the sound of the birds abandoning her cause.
He was traipsing through the water and still he refused to drink.
— No, he couldn't. And his daughter, for all she tried, was too weary to heal him this time.
He kept looking the same direction, opposite her, but there was nothing there.
"What are you looking at?" Aleu demanded, and same as the last time and the time before, he didn't reply.
