Role

Chapter 8

Four wolf pups born at the end of the Summer, gorged and grown on the
bountiful deer of the forest, yipped about as they played one of their last
carefree games with their mother before they joined the pack as hunters. The
she-wolf tussled with her young wolves in the autumn foliage. Occasionally
she would glance up a thick branch of the nearby Living Oak tree, toward the
silent sitting form of Admund. She would keen at him. An invitation to
forsake his brooding thoughts, to join them and to be free.

Admund kept his eyes locked at the wolves as his bare knuckles kept grinding
the colored paste on a large piece of bark. A mother and her wolves, as they
were meant to be. A mother that would charge at a bear, teeth bared. A mother
that would NEVER harm her children.

Images of Lyrentia inviting him for a talk. Memories of his heart racing as
she agreed to come to the forest so he could see her face. Asking about those
damned Robes of the Heartless, needed for some abominable Scion ritual, but
promising not to coerce.

He raised his cramped knuckle to his forehead, above his right eye and
smeared the verdant green paste over his brow and eye and cheek in one
deliberate, rough gesture. 'Rise, Thar-Eris!' the thought echoed in his
buzzing head. A mark, for Mother.

He moved the bark carefully to the side, and started grinding another colored
paste with his other hand. His mind skipped from the wolves to the mountains.
To his foolish wish that Lyrentia would be his mountain, and he the rocks in
the valley beneath. He thought of his foolish wish that people were as sharp
rocks high up in the mountain streams, rolling down into the river and
gradually taking a softer, rounder shape and finally in their final form
finding rest and content among their kin-the rest of sea borne rocks.