the wolves will chase you by the pale moonlight
{drunk and driven by the devil's hunger}
He does not need to look toward Bright to know that she was there. He tracked her with every cell in his body, the same way he tracked all of his family. He felt his mother running through the Chamber, but he did not feel guilt for the terror in her veins—the fear that she had lost her children. He accepts it as yet another truth of the world and he did not spend much time dwelling on it. He also felt, in some distant corner of this land, his paternal grandfather in the kingdom of sandy dunes. He felt his maternal grandfather running himself ragged around the meadow, the sickness in his lungs. They were all moving beacons in his mind, and he did not struggle to feel them ebbing and flowing around him. After all, his very existence was tied into their own. He was their anchor—even if they did not know it.
Turning back to Atrox, his forest-green eyes sharpen a little, and his lips barely curve. “I know,” he finally says, speaking aloud for the first time in his life. His voice is surprisingly deep for a colt of a few hours, the sound of it ringing and echoing in his throat. “You have been King of the,” he roots through his great-grandfather’s mind for a second before finding the word, “Chamber twice. Your heart is beating beneath us right now.” Woolf digs into the ground, feels his magic wrap around the heart once, testing the edges of it, relishing the pulse before unwrapping itself and returning to its source. “You are the panther.”
The panther. The nightwalker. The rogue. The diseased.
They were all tied to them. He felt the strings extending from him and his sister to them, the tenuous ties that seemingly swayed in the wind. Woolf closed his eyes, and his smile was distant before he brought himself back. “Mother will be back soon,” he murmurs, not in too much of a rush to let her find them. He was not interested in being coddled like a child, and while he was beginning to feel the pangs of hunger, he knew he could stave them off for a while longer. Turning toward his sister, he nosed at her neck a little, finding comfort in having her next to him, the magic between them building upon itself like a storm. Beneath their feet, small grass pushes through the pine needles and begins to flourish. He does not notice.
Woolf
