forget all the names we used to know
Spring is waning. Soon summer will come and with it, the hunt. Crevan thinks of the summer as a bounty ripe with harvest, just out of reach. In her height, the great season was full to the brim with young, unproven prey waiting to fall beneath him and slow, stringy meals that would not last to see another winter through. It was glorious, the thought of it; all those warm, star-lit nights and hot, hazy days. In the present he lowers his ivory chin onto relaxed paws and closes his eyes as shade from the spattering of fiery-gold light. The weather is near to perfect and it’s close to afternoon. A bird call twitches one ear.
“Why can’t we just look for easy food now?” He remembers demanding as a pup, once. “There are babies almost everywhere.” He’d whined and it was true; that Spring of his youth had been as alive as ever with babies. In fact, he remembers that very morning having unearthed a bankside den of squirming, little pink rabbits. Six of them, delicious each one and yet, his mother had demanded they go and hunt instead of scavenge when he had told her the wonderful news. It had set his fur on edge all day, right up until they had trotted into the heart of the redwoods and he’d sputtered out that weedling question.
Even back then he remembers being close to his mother’s height, young as he was. She could’ve been his littermate, not his mother for all the similarities between them. He was as tall as her! Why not as smart?
“Oh for god’s sake, pha on your silly ‘bayy-bees’!” The mahogany she-wolf had snapped, rounding on him like a possessed demon - spitting upon him with the gnash of her snarling teeth. “To think that you call yourself wolf-kin,” She’d bristled, her eyes gone white to the rim in madness. Her mouth had been agape, pink tongue curled in the back of her throat as she rushed him. His mother tore at his neck with a fury, back then, jerking free tufts of pale hair until a savage blow to his left eye and a squealing yelp stopped her assault.
Heaving, Circinae had stood towering above his cringing form and muttered darkly, “If you’re too craven to rise and meet the challenge of survival, you’ll become a slimy, slinking dog. Too weak to hunt, too weak to be anything more than useless.” Had been her premonition. “Never forget that, and never forget how closely your own silly name rhymes with it. ‘Kray-von’ and ‘Cree-von', nearly the same. Dog or Wolf, you choose.”
The crackle of something nearby startles him awake, and with a trembling snarl his fur sets on edge. Huffing, his heart still racing, the young beast turns (what used to be his weak side) the left of his face to the still wood. His eye has long since healed; the scar now gone completely.
revan
@[Thana] I wrote you a novel? <3