The Lord ✔️

Chapter 22

Chapter 22: A Chance To Return

He stared at her, his eyes wide. His paws thrummed restlessly at the ground, and his dark shape blended in with the fir tree behind him. Her eyes were open now, amber with paler flecks of dark grey. She blinked, but she did not speak, as he had gone from shocked to hostile, and he bared his teeth.
She did not flinch or move. She sat, but she kept her tail high. There was no point of injuring herself. Her capturer had made sure that there was no escape point for her, and she was fed once in three days. Good enough, but she hoped that the capturer did not treat her two children like this. The third one didn't count. Too much like the capturer, she was, currently.
"I don't know who you are," he said. "You are a trespasser, a rouge, a wanderer, a dispersal, I do not care, but you are in my land." He looked weary.
"I am neither," she responded calmly. "I am a prisoner, captured by the capturer." Her claws scraped the dirt. He looked slightly mystified at her eerie response, and scared, as he had backed away nearly a tail-length.
"The capturer is not her, I presume?" his curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he had lost every sign of hostility.
"It is her." her response left him terrified. It was her, the one they all feared. The one who had killed many, and committed more signs than a killer bear.
"And you are the lost one?"
She nodded, a ghost of a smile appearing on her face, but she sank back once more into the expressionless mask she called home. "I am the lost one, the prisoner, the one who wasn't there for my pups; you may call me whatever."
"Your pups are fine," he answered her, relived to be off the subject of her. He bowed his head and gave his companion a look of both awe, and much respect.
"I knew they would be strong," there was no emotion in her voice. "I did not raise them like that—I wasn't there—they did not know me. It was from their genetics they became who they are. They shaped themselves."
"Do you want me to take you to them?" he asked, and he was looking at her in the eyes. "I promised her, I cursed her, that I would." He growled softly.
She raised her eyebrows. She had not expected him to know the way out of the capturer's paws, away from here. But she knew she wouldn't find her pups nearby, and certainly not here. Not alone, either. He knew the way around the forest, he knew which stars were which and the names of the trees.
"You may, if you know where my pups have ventured."
He nodded again. "I know where they lie," he said. "I have seen them, watched them. They are strong."
"That is a good thing to hear," she said. "They must be somewhere. They lie further from here, do they not?"
"Yes," he replied. "They lie far away, across from many valleys. They have left where they grew up. They have become something more. Now, we wait for the battle—the greatest battle."