• K A T H O D O S •

Refunded Breedings
Spoiler- Bucket #74610

The Bonds That Bind Us

The world came crashing down when Kathodos was just three weeks old. 

One moment, he was nestled in the warm, milky darkness of the birthing den, pressed between his mother's heaving ribs and the soft whimpers of his littermates. The next a roar of shifting earth, the splintering of roots, and then nothing but weight. Dirt packed his nostrils, filled his mouth with the taste of iron and rot. His tiny lungs burned as he tried to scream, but the mountain sat upon his chest, indifferent to his struggle. 

Then light, sharp and blinding. 

A grizzled muzzle streaked with scars clamped onto his scruff, hauling him free in one brutal motion. He tumbled onto the snow, gasping, his puppy fur matted with mud and blood that wasn't his own. Above him stood Vareth, the pack's one-eyed beta, his flank heaving from the effort of digging. Around them, the rest of the pack still scrabbled at the wreckage, their claws splintering against the collapsed roots and packed earth. 

No answering whimpers came from below. 
Vareth's teeth snapped near his ear, close enough that Kathodos felt the vibration of the snarl in his skull. "Breathe," the old wolf commanded. Then, when Kathodos' legs finally stopped shaking: "Now walk." 
 
Vareth raised him like a whetstone against a blade each lesson designed to hone, each failure punished with pain that meant something. 

--

At Four Months Old:
"Stay Still."
Kathodos crouched in a thicket of blackthorn, the brambles pressing against his belly like a hundred needle-teeth. A lynx passed so close he could count the spots on its tawny flank, could see the way its whiskers twitched at the scent of wolf-pup.

When the lynx finally moved on, Vareth yanked him free by the scruff. "Fear has a scent," the old wolf growled, licking the blood from where the thorns had pricked too deep. "Learn to swallow yours."

At Seven Months Old:
"Observe and watch."
Vareth let a limping snowshoe hare escape their hunt. Kathodos had protestedthey were hungry, the pack was waiting but Vareth's glare silenced him. By dusk, they found it again. Or what was left of it. 

The hare's hindquarters were gone, the spine snapped clean. A cougar's kill. 

"Prey chooses the predator sometimes," Vareth said, nudging the carcass with his nose. "Chase the wrong weakness, and you become the meal." 

At Eleven Months Old:
"Use your senses and smell." 
The moose carcass lay half-buried in the spring melt, its flesh bloated and sweet with decay. Kathodos lunged only for Vareth to slam into him, knocking him sideways into the mud. 

Foam bubbled between the old wolf's teeth. "Raven-stench means poison," he snarled. "Two-pawed lace the guts with death. Smell it?"

And Kathodos did beneath the rot, the faintest tang of something metallic, something wrong. 

--
 
He noticed the stranger long before the rest of the pack did. 

A hulking Arctic yearling, his pelt so pale it glowed against the dusky pines, crashing through the underbrush with all the grace of a falling tree. Kathodos watched from the high rocks as the young wolf Goliath attempted to stalk a beaver, his massive paws splashing through the shallows like boulders.  

But then came the drifters three rangy males with ribs showing beneath their patchy fur. They cornered Goliath at the river's bend, their lips curled back from yellowed teeth. The white wolf was strong, but outnumbered. 

Kathodos didn't charge. Didn't snarl. 

He threw his voice against the cliff walls instead, howling in sharp, staccato bursts that echoed like a dozen wolves answering. The drifters' ears swiveled. One bolted. The rest followed. 

Goliath whirled, his shoulder bleeding from where teeth had grazed him. "That was a dirty trick," he panted, but his golden-clay eyes gleamed with something like respect. 

Kathodos flicked his tail toward the deadfall traps hidden beneath the riverbank's leaves. "You were two steps from worse."
--

Winter tested them. 

A blizzard caught them on the frozen lake, the wind howling like the ghosts of lost pups. Kathodos had miscalculated the ice was thinner here, weakened by an underground spring. 

Goliath's paw broke through with a sound like a snapping bone. 

For one heartbeat, the world was silent. 

Then Kathodos lunged, his teeth closing on Goliath's scruff as the younger wolf flailed. His bad shoulder, the one that always stiffened in the cold, yelped as he hauled backward. The ice groaned beneath them, spiderweb cracks spreading like lightning. 

They collapsed together on solid ground, Goliath coughing up freezing water. "...Knew you'd—"

"Quiet." Kathodos was already scanning the lake, his ears flat against his skull. 

But that night, he slept pressed against Goliath's dry flank, his nose tucked into the thick fur of the younger wolf's neck.

Some lessons, after all, go both ways.

--- 

"What are they to each other?"
The pups whisper, watching the timber wolf and the white move as one through the dawn mist.

The elders smile, their teeth glinting like old knives.

"The reason the other hasn't died yet."