Blake

“Do you know what your father told me?”

The elder wolf’s voice felt like sunshine; calm, reassuring. It tickled the fur on Blake’s ear, but he couldn’t manage so much as opening his eyes, every fiber of his being buzzing with exhaustion. In his heart, though, he knew she didn’t mind—she’d been telling him bedtime stories for many, many moons after all.

“He said,” she went on softly, “that you’re our hope. Our future.”

Doubt flooded the young wolf, his father’s bared teeth flashing in his mind’s eye. He couldn’t even imagine such words being spoken by the alpha, particularly to him, or about him.

His elder seemed to read these emotions on him, and he heard her huff, felt her breath again brush his fur. Fondness tinged her voice as she murmured on, “He cares for you, young one. More than you know. More than he’ll likely ever say. He believes in you.”

A tongue gently grooming the hereditary blaze on his forehead soothed his apprehension, and he sunk deeper into the earth.

“He believes you will save us.”

Something more tickled the fur on his back and haunches—stronger than the elder’s breath and colder as well. Slowly, it began to grow so cold he could feel it down to his skin, a chilled weight gradually covering his body, and as it came and became, he could feel the other wolf slipping away.

“Find Sunpeak,” she told him as the wind began to roar. “Find Sunpeak, and live on. For us.”

And all too abruptly, Blake startled into consciousness and leapt from his tomb of snow, gasping for air. The winter chill stung his lungs and his paws all felt numb with the biting cold, but he broke into a run without hesitation, battling against the blizzard’s front winds as he’d been doing for the past three weeks, just to chase the ghost of his dream.

It was the last promise he made to his grandmother, her words now seared into his mind by the fires that destroyed the place and the wolves he had always called home.

For his family, for his future, he needed to find it.

The land of his ancestors—Sunpeak.