Riverside Rogues

Prologue.

Riverside Rogues

Prologue

Crisp white snow fell in scattered bliss, making the world around us bright and silent. Breaths clouded, bodies wrapped around each other, it was always colder for us in the winter. Unlike those who belong in packs, we've been shunned from ours, but that was ages ago, the past. 

Brother and sister verses the world. That's our title, that's all we've lived by. A simple saying to keep our hopes up, that one day we'd find a pack who'd accept us, despite the nature of our name, and how long we've held it.

We're rogues, we travel a lot of places, it's kinda our way. Treading through the forest and staying out of pack boundaries unless we are requesting to stay in their town. Half of the time, we hardly get the chance to since they bark us away, usher us to get off their property.

We aren't any harm. We're not weak neither, we're strong. We train a lot, we know the forests of the country like the back of our hand ( or paw in our case ). We've been through winters so harsh that the human's hospitals were sometimes the only way to not get ourselves killed. It isn't the most fun way to go I guess, freezing and slowly collapsing from failure to circulate warmth around your body. Weather was neither a friend or foe, it was neutral. Sometimes it decided to play with you, to test your strengths... This isn't a good thing.

But as the snow fell, dropping hints as to how long it would coat the grounds and numb our feet. I guess around a month at the longest this year. We could already sense that It's more vigorous than usual, I could also see my brother coming to the same conclusion and pulled me towards him, morphing heat between us.

" Another long snowfall huh? " I whispered, nuzzling his neck with my head, trying to add friction to the fire, a little bit of extra heat never hurts. Never.

" Indeed it is " His head bobbed weakly, his fear showing through. He always hated winter, ever since we lost our youngest sibling to the frost five years ago and I caught a really bad cold just before the freeze. It was the three of us, but it's lowered to two. I missed my little guy, this is why I hate winter, it's a time of loss and greed. 

It aggravated me.

" W-when do you think we'll find a pack. Or at least a house? We can't do this forever... " I ask, worrying he'll get grumpy again. Maluke isn't entirely keen on finding a pack, says they'll most likely be assholes who'll treat us like dirt because of us being rogues. It's not our fault what happened, it never will be neither, but I guess fate dealt us the bad fortunes.

Looking around, a paper thin layer of ice lay at the forest floor. Trees having decorated with small sprinkles of snow on one side from the winds blowing gails. My face was stinging as my brother took my hand. 

" It doesn't matter, we need shelter " 

Avoiding the fact again, he tugged me towards the river, and we followed the stream upwards, finding a rocky cave surrounding a large clear water lake. I smiled, we'd been here once before, best winter we'd had, our first year of freedom. We were close to our old pack though...

Casting my brother a worried look, he knew what I was thinking, what I wanted to ask. 

" It's fine, we're not that close to our old pack, they wouldn't search for us. They couldn't care less. Come on. " 

We found an opening in the rocks, a small space where you could walk inside about three steps and almost stand up. Curling up into my usual ball, I had a weird hope that maybe they would look for us, despite completely abandoning us to die.

Causing friction between my mittens, I closed my eyes to hope they'd take us back, to let us try and prove that we weren't the monsters they'd pinned us as. We didn't do anything.

By morning, I knew that it was just a deranged dream of mine that would never happen, because we were off and walking in the first flash of morning light, and successfully crept past our old pack to head west of the country. My brother wasn't the planning type, he liked to go around and go along his own lines. 

This was the only thing he had wrong with him, his rashness, and his disorganised attitude, it got us into fights with other rogues constantly. He was the reason I was always scared of everyone acting like monsters, but through all of this I learnt that that's what the packs think we are. Monsters, freaks, danger. 

That's why rogues on your land was bad and trouble. We're all stronger because we have the tough life, packs have it easy, only training lightly in gyms, and with each other. We learn as we go, we learn all terrain, all the hazards and how to sniff out anything within a mile radius of where we're stood.

Being this powerful, the only thing keeping rogues from being their own packs is our now stubborn and big headed attitude, we all think we're ahead of the game. That even our small groups are enough to wipes out packs. 

No, that's very wrong, but a big group of us and we could take care of ourselves easily. But putting someone in command was always a struggle, me and my brother fought for power constantly. It's a pity since half the time I like being submissive to people, since it makes me seem like less of a threat when really I could tear out a throat within seconds.

It's all about trickery with us too. We use our silent skill that we learnt from the night, the strength we use from our determination. Our acting we've learnt from hard times put upon us. We're heartless because we've run out of care, you can have a few friends as a rogue and not much else. You're always in danger of losing everything. . .

 -Edited-