zg_shadows | Never a proper victory? (Reply)

The smell of burning filled her nose. She sneezed, again. Even in its death throes, London smelled awful.

Its death throes. There was a fierce, hot joy inside her, like the joy of a successful hunt, like the taste of hot, rich flesh in her mouth after weeks of hunger. And more. Because it was not just this city that was dying; from the homid-words that had been spoken around her she had understood that it was all of them, all the cities that chained Gaia in their weaver-webs, dropping off and letting her run free...

And yet her people did not share her joy. Ylli she understood; Ylli had lost her birth-pack, the kin that she had run with, and the crushing weight of her grief had lowered Summer's head as well, because she was pack now (and that was another, smaller joy). But all the Garou had stood and watched the red sky like the sun rising over the city as if it were the end of the world, and not the beginning. Even Patches seemed to bear a grief that was not his packmate's, and where was the sense in that? What were a few broken stones, what were a few broken apes (and there were still enough and more than enough apes) when set against the life of the world? They were Garou, all, and yet they had forgotten...

She lay, now, at the highest point of the not-Caern (it should never have had a Weaver-totem) where she had flung herself down, exhausted but too excited to sleep. The snow had started falling soon after they had returned, and to her tired mind for a moment it felt just like the snow that had had settled on the thick fur of Runs-Like-Bird, and there was a fleeting aftertaste of mammoth meat in her mouth that had not been tasted in many lifetimes of wolves.

They would remember. They would be helped to remember.