Lone Wolf

Thunderheart.
    And so Gwynneth told him about the Obea and how when a malcadh was born it was required by ancient wolf laws to take the pup and leave it to die. That the mother and the father were driven from the pack.
    The sky grew darker, and in the folds of the night by the Rogue smith's fire, Faolan listened while Gwynneth explained the ways of the wolves. As he listened, he began to gnaw on the bone of Thunderheart lightly, the delicate etching noises threading through Gwynneth's words.
    "But if that wolf pup lives it may rejoin the pack as a gnaw wolf."
    "A gnaw wolf? What's that?"
    Gwynneth waited a moment before answering and cocked her head to look at the lines Faolan had etched on the bone. "It is what you have become, but your designs are beyond your years, almost better than any I have ever seen, even at the drumlyn of Hamish, the Fengo of the Watch."
    When she said those last words there was a familiar resonance to them, as if Faolan had heard them somewhere before. Not heard them! Seen them! He recalled the paintings on the cave walls where the five volcanoes were depicted -- the towering mounds, the drumlyn with a wolf perched atop each one. It was as if he had not just seen those paintings, but lived them in some dim, misty time.
    "So if I return I am to become a gnaw wolf?"
    Gwynneth tipped her head straight up, then straight down. Faolan had never seen a bird or any animal able to move its head in the peculiar way an owl did.
    "Yes," she replied. "And it's hard."
    "But you say I am good at it."
    "That will make it harder for you."
    "I don't understand."
    "They treat gnaw wolves especially roughly when they  first return. Other young wolves will be jealous. You need to prove yourself."
    "Isn't being abandoned, carried away, and expected to die, rough enough? Haven't I proven enough already?" He paused and muttered something almost unintelligible in a deep reverberating tone that sounded quite bearish. Indeed it was the old bear oath that Thunderheart often growled when she was irritated. Urskadamus, curse of a rabid bear.
    He sighed deeply. "So my first mother, my first Milk Giver did not leave me. I was taken. But what about my second, Thunderheart?"
    Gwynneth blinked her dark eyes. "You don't mean to say that you think that Thunderheart abandoned you?"
    "It's not like with wolves and Obeas. No one takes things from a grizzly bear," Faolan replied evenly.
    Gwynneth was caught up short by the young wolf's response. Of course it was absolutely true. No creature in his or her right mind would try to take anything from a grizzly. "She did not leave you, Faolan. You must stop that kind of thinking right now."
    "Then why did she go away?" Faolan shoved his ear forward, and his hackles rose up. He was quivering with a new terror, a possibility he had never really thought of, or  faced. The emptiness that had become an omnipresent space beside him seemed now to engulf him. It almost radiated with not just his loneliness, but his fear that he was completely and forever unlovable.
    This terror came with its own shadow and the bright reflections of the flames from Gwynneth's fire, which had moments before filigreed the darkness with bright orange light raked with sparks, seemed to be quenched. The very air turned darker.
    "Maybe she went to find you. To search for you. Maybe she thought you were lost." He cringed and pulled his lips back so they cleared his teeth. Fear, and shame coursed through him. It all made a terrible kind of sense now. He had found the winter den boring. He could not believe how much Thunderheart slept. The thickness of her sleep lay like a heavy pelt on the air of the den. Sometimes he had to get out -- to run, hunt. He loved leaping through the big soft drifts of snow. And he remembered how slowly her heart beat. Not the familiar booming rhythm, but softer, sluggish. He could get up and turn around two times then snuggle back down against her between the beats of that slow heart. And every once in a while she would wake up, groggy and slightly confused. If he had been out on a run when she woke, she might have  panicked and gone out to find him. The shadow of the void, that omnipresent space retreated a bit. The terror grew slightly dimmer, the flames once more threaded the black with glints and winks of light.
    "You are right. She left to search for me because sometimes I would get bored in the winter den. She must have forgotten that she told me it was all right to go out and hunt