The Darkness Within

03 - The Naming, the Lake, and the Boy

Ciara and her wolf-pup companion spent the next six days occupying their time with a mixture of puppy playing, exploring the unknown forest around them, and observing the wolf-people.

The wolf-people were certainly odd, but the more she observed them, the more their behavior seemed to follow a pattern. After a while, she noticed four distinct things.

Firstly, there was an obvious chain of command. The Alpha and the female that she had overheard people calling 'Luna' seemed to be at the top. They bowed to no one but everyone bowed to them. There were also other individuals she had come to notice receiving signs of submission from the majority of people, but even between these people there was a hierarchy and they all, ultimately, submitted to the Alpha and "Luna."

The second thing she noticed was the rarity of children. There were a good number of adults, but there were only around five teenagers, the three children she had seen playing, and two babies, one of which had just started walking.

The lack of children was made odd by the third thing she noticed, the extremely touchy couples. There were a number of pairs of the wolf-people that always seemed attached at the hip. She had seen them doing jobs separately, but when not forced to be separate because of their work, they were always in each other's arms. There were a few times that she had observed one of the wolf-people say something or do something that made one of the other wolf-people upset, and even if it had merely been teasing, it was not uncommon for the significant other of the upset wolf-person to attack the one upsetting them. The two would fight, and the one fighting for their significant other always seemed to win. Then, after being satisfied with their win and the antagonist's submission, they would heatedly kiss their counterpart before leaving the scene together. The even odder thing was that no one attempted to stop the fights, and let them carry them out, even if someone ended up injured in the process. Ciara thought with the high number of couples, there would be more children, but apparently not.

The fourth thing she noticed was that everyone has their own distinct jobs. There were the five hunters that had led her to the clearing in the first place and they went out to hunt every other day, bringing back anywhere from two to three deer. Ciara hadn't followed them since because she had enough meat, but in two days' time, she would need to restock. Ciara had seen a doctor and nurse after fights between the wolf-people. She had also seen a number of warriors training in intensive combat and they worked as guards and surveyed the perimeter. The guards were trained by one of the couples she had noticed. Through observation, she observed that the couple was the third-most dominant in the community, and that both of the people in the relationship were female. The fact that no one seemed to feel odd about that, tore at a broken part of her, and Ciara did her best to ignore the pain it brought up. 

A number of the wolf-people worked inside, so she didn't know what they did, but she saw one of the teenage-looking wolf-people bring the three children outside to play every day, and Ciara assumed she was responsible for taking care of the children while others worked.

Now, Ciara was walking through the forest with the ever-growing wolf-pup at her side. She didn't know where she was going really but there had been a tug at the back of her mind for days leading her in this direction and she had finally gotten annoyed with it today and decided to follow it. Plowing through the snow around her, the now healthy wolf-pup looked happy. It grew unnaturally fast, and was now just bigger than a medium-sized dog, maybe a border collie or an Australian shepherd. It was odd, and Ciara was concerned with the sudden extreme growth, but the pup seemed happy and exhibited no signs of pain so she brushed it off. Despite her size, the pup still held puppy-like proportions. She still had the overly-large puppy paws, large but standing up ears that she hadn't grown into yet, and the short-snouted puppyness in her face. If she kept growing at this rate, Ciara figured the pup would grow to be bigger than a horse before it was even seven months old.