Lone Wolf

-- it..." Faolan stuttered. "It's not fair."
    Gwynneth puffed up to twice her size. She stepped so close to Faolan that her beak almost touched his nose. "You are too fine a wolf to think in such a small, selfish, stupid manner!" She lifted one wing and whacked him on the head. He sprang back. "Now you must go. Go to the wolves."
    "I know nothing about them!"
    "You know more than you think," Gwynneth said, her voice gentle again.
    "Can I visit you?"
    She sighed. "Not until you come back the gnaw wolf of a pack." The soft gray shadows before the dawn were thickening. "Now I must go to sleep. It's almost twixt time."
    "Twixt time? What's that?"
    Gwynneth yawned sleepily. "Twixt time is that minute between the last vanishing drop of the night and the first rosy drop of the dawn. We call it twixt time and if I don't get to sleep before that rosy drop, it's very hard for me."
    "You sleep in the day?" Faolan was startled. "Um-hm." Gwynneth nodded, her eyes half closed. "Such are the ways of owls."
    Faolan sighed. The world seemed very complicated.
    Owls slept during the day, bears through the winter. Would wolves have a new way of sleeping? What did he know about anything?
    The fire was turning cold. The day growing lighter and emptier. Once more, Faolan felt a desperate desire to recapture time. Maybe Gwynneth was right. Time could not exactly be measured, not that warm time he had spent with her in a cocoon spun of firelight and star shine, of the crackles and hiss as the flames danced in their own hot wind.
    He heaved himself up and, with the bone of Thunderheart in his jaws, he began to walk away. Never had he felt so lonely.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
    ***
    INSPIRATION

    AFTER MANY HOURS OF SLEEP, Gwynneth felt the world growing darker. Tween time was approaching. The bright shadows that danced on the inside of her eyelids were beginning to turn a dusky violet. And although she still slept, something stirred in her, a gentle alert that the darkness all owls loved was approaching. Though her body remained motionless in the niche across from her forge, a part of her began to rise in a dream flight. Not a feather moved, and yet a whisper of wind lofted her toward that border between sleeping and waking. Then, precisely at the moment of true twilight when the sun dropped beneath the horizon, Gwynneth woke up. Her first thought was Has he gone?
    She peered out from the stone niche and then stepped into the evening, spinning her head almost completely  around. There was no sign of him. She felt a mixture of ease and sadness. She was relieved to be alone again, but she had to admit that she had found the young wolf's company a pleasure. The wolf was companionable and intriguing, and certainly the mark on the splayed paw was puzzling. The thought of it brought a little twitch to her gizzard.
    Gwynneth reflected for several moments about the design on the paw and then with one talon tried to draw that design in the hard dirt near her forge. She wondered what the significance was of those spiraling lines. But even more unfathomable to Gwynneth was her shock upon seeing the spiral, like a bolt of lightning that seemed to flash through her gizzard. Why? What possible meaning could it have for her?
    She poked at the fire a bit and then picked up the misshapen metal that she was trying to forge into a willow leaf. But those swirling lines filled her mind's eye and soon she realized that the elongated oval of the willow leaf was being stretched into another shape. She had not been aware that she had been slowly twirling the tongs as she held the piece in the fire to heat it. It had just seemed a comforting motion, almost hypnotic, as her mind had considered the pattern on Faolan's paw. The hunk of  metal that had been roughly the shape of a leaf assumed a conical shape, and then, as the Rogue smith accelerated the twirling motion of the tongs, twists began to ripple from the point of the cone toward the base.
    Quickly, Gwynneth drew the molten form out of the fire and began to tap the indentations between the rippling twists with her smallest hammer. She became more and more excited as she saw what was happening. It was as if she didn't even have to think, as if her talons had a direct connection to her gizzard. She worked ceaselessly, with a deeper concentration than she had ever experienced. Fluidly, she moved from one task to another as an extraordinary object began to emerge. She had to adjust the heat of the fire constantly by