Anything that I want:
I will breathe, I will breathe,
I won't worry at all!
You will pay for your sins,
You'll be sorry, my dear;
All the lies, all the whys
Will all be crystal clear...
-- P!nk, "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)"
February 6th; Evening, sunset; Partly cloudy, impending snowstorm...
It was a funny feeling being at home now when things were starting to get back to what was considered "normal." Angier went one way, Mother went another, his annoying half-brothers and the red-headed kid were going to be left behind (there was no way in hell anyone was going to make Skoll stick around to cub-sit them...), Aunt Sorya and the other women steered clear of him, Morganna remained scarce, and the other males of Willow Ridge - well, to be quite honest the prince could have spared a bit more energy to keep tabs on all of them - were all off on their own agenda. But, as it stood, the dark-crowned yearling could not be currently bothered to go out of his way to pester them all.
Ghost gray eyes squinted as he surveyed his surroundings as he paced around the all too familiar terrain. He stopped on his stilt-like legs, his heavy frame barely even lurching to halt as he pressed his nose to a particular tree to make sure no one had come close to it. It was here, somewhere beneath the snow and in-between the smooth roots in the chilled earth, that his beloved prizes laid in wait for the spring thaw. His beloved tailless maowse, the grotesque corpse of a fishing spider and the most recently recovered bit of groundhog hide from the first hunt he and his siblings had ever participated in. It wasn't much now, being no more than a couple inches long and stripped of all its course brown fur, but after having found out what @Morganna had done with it, he made sure to snatch it from right under her nose when the chance came.
He cleared his nostrils with a loud snort and a shrug. Good... the only one to have been in the area most recently besides him was Angier; and, Angier knew better than to snoop around - that is, if the thickheaded patriarch even figured out that his step-son had a penchant for caching a bizarre assortment of things away.
A smug smile graced his ivory-furred lips. Now that he was truly alone (and a quick sniff and look around confirmed this) on the outskirts of Ridge wolf territory, he let his stark black tail lift up in an intimidating arch. A toothy grin broadened along his muzzle. To say that Skoll Archer was restless and off-putting was an understatement. In the months since his first day as a yearling, he had grown to be... something... and this something was a tenebrific identity - a persona, a character, a beast, a monster - that was as wild and unforgiving as a summer flood or a winter storm. Something that was not meant to be trifled or reckoned with.
Since this sort of... personality shift... nothing has never been more clear in the three months before his second birthday.
His hackles rose in spike-like tufts at his nape and shoulders and for a time he lashed out at the snow with tooth, claw, and nail, absolutely tired of waiting. At last his patience had worn thin. With a growl fading from the depths of his throat, he tipped his head skyward and let loose a summons for the only being he believed worthy of his presence and his attention... @Elettra...
"MOTHER!!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs, nearby songbirds fleeing in fear from their treetop perches all around him. "ELETTRAAA!"