Very good colour like if it’s good

Hi President Loki! Are u going to continue writing?

Best camouflage in game #invisible

Waning Unity

Lume's Epilogue

Lume watched from higher up the creek as a tired old bear snatched one of the unfortunate salmon that had leaped past. It started to turn and lumber away before catching her eye and holding her gaze. There was no animosity, no silent threats between them. Each had seen something similar in the other and that was enough to give them an understanding that very few creatures could match. The grizzly grumbled lowly, and a small, fluffy cub poked its head out from behind a rock, quickly waddling after the mother as she disappeared down the hills.

"You see?" Lume asked, still looking at the spot the bear had once been. "You're safe here. There's no need to worry."

Voices from behind her caught her attention, and she turned to see familiar shapes rise over the pebbled ridge, laughing and chasing and playing with one another as a larger shape trotted and kept watch over them from behind. "Stop biting your sister's tail," Fraser scolded one of the pups lightly, shoving two that were shooting each other scorching glares further up the hill. Raising to her paws, Lume padded down to meet them halfway, a familiar tickling sensation at her heels.

"Have fun chasing rabbits?" She asked, a soft smile spreading on her face as the pups tumbled at her feet. "Yeah, yeah!" One chirped with excitement, "I almost caught one! I would have if Fawn hadn't gotten in the way," she grumbled, shooting Fawn another glare. The other pup simply stuck his tongue out in retaliation. "You tripped over your clumsy paws, Wildflower," he protested. "That rabbit could have taken a nap and still outran you."

Naming the two had been an instant matter for Lume. She'd insisted to Fraser that they be named after his fallen pack mates, the least she could do after the two had lost their lives because of her.

"Alright, alright that's enough you two," Fraser chuckled, placing himself between them. "Did you have any trouble back here?" He asked, looking up at Lume. The much less ethereal wolf shook her head before looking down and meeting the large eyes of the pup pressed firmly behind her. "We saw a bear and her cub. She gave us no trouble... I think we both recognized the look of a mother in each other's eyes." Doe had inherited a quiet and sometimes timid nature, and she was often inseparable from Lume. The other two were quick learners, and she trusted them to easily take care of themselves, but Doe brought out a protective side of Lume that hadn't been active in a long time. Perhaps because she saw the pup the same way she had seen Fraser initially, though somewhat different since she was a mother now.

The word still felt foreign to her... 'mother.' She was still in awe when she looked down at the trio of fluffy little canids that followed them gleefully (or rather shyly, in Doe's case.) Had she and Fraser done this, make these wonderful, funny, unbelievable little miracles? The days of violence and fear seemed like another life, a past that existed only in tales to be told to children.

Despite her reservations, Fraser still entertained the pups of the ancient Moon wolf, of her fierce wrath and graceful protection, of the days he had run from her and run towards her. Per her request, he never revealed the Moon wolf's true identity. In all honesty, Lume no longer felt like a myth. She had lived countless years and watched many lives raise and fade, but now every day was a lifetime for her. Some part of her knew that when the part of her that lived and breathed essence died, her eternal nature died as well. Just as with any other, she would grow old and sick and die.

But there was something else to be said with that: she would grow old with Fraser, and they would watch their children grow together. They would get sick together, and someday they would die and be reunited in the Forever Grounds together too.

So what if Lume was no longer immortal? Now, she was finally alive.

(Now I'm picturing us both watching this all unfold like a movie and you and I just bawling our eyes out in the corner.)

~CL1

[P.S. This has truly been a joy to write, and though I'm sad the ride's over, I'm so happy with the ending (I feel like I rushed the end of Blood War, if I'm being honest, and this was my chance at redemption.) Thank you so much for the collaboration Pres, and for creating the Howlverse in the first place, but now that we're done, I'll kindly have to ask you...

ARE YOU GONNA FINISH BLACK GHOST AND ALH OR WHAT?!

Ahem. That is all. Thank you, and good night.]

Waning Unity

Fraser’s Epilogue

What exactly was love?

For a long time Fraser wouldn’t have been able to answer that question. A powerful bond? Sure, you could say that. An emotion that fits right alongside joy and anger? Maybe that, too.

But he had come to learn that love was something that truly couldn’t be described. It was something to be experienced, to understand by living in the moment and learn by walking alongside another. Another who you loved, who you cherished, who made the world go round because they were all that mattered.

Contrary to what he would have thought for his life, Fraser finally had that someone.

He and Lume never stayed in one place. They didn’t have to. They traveled where they pleased and saw what they wished to see; forests of glorious trees that were high as the sky itself, wide-open plains filled to the brim with flowers painted colors as bright as the sunset. Brilliant sights of cascading oceans and peaceful valleys and bare mountaintops that made for the best sights of the sky and stars at night. But nothing, no matter how many places they went, was more brilliant to see than the white face that accompanied Fraser every step of the way.

And every day, no matter where they would run to and explore, they would share an intimacy so precious that Fraser had trouble keeping a smile from his face. He would say her name and she would say his, and they didn’t have to speak verbal words to understand each other completely. They would walk side-by-side across the banks of babbling brooks and listen to the birdsong high in overhead trees. They would look at each other and, for such a small moment, the world would fall still all around them as their eyes met and their heartbeats joined together into one sound, into one rhythm. And if there was such thing as a perfect moment, that would be it.

Because that moment? That moment was everything.

It was the kind of moment that gave the sun motivation to rise, the kind of moment that encouraged the birds to sing and the breeze to whistle and the rivers to rush. It was the kind of moment that made the stars bright and worth looking at, the kind of moment that made all other moments weak by comparison.

And it was their moment to share forever.

So Fraser no longer had to wonder what love was or how to describe it. It was a question that could remain safely unanswered, a question for others to wonder as they sought out a reason for their lives. But Fraser didn’t have to wonder anymore, and no longer did he have to spend nights alone in his old pack’s abandoned home praying for his company to return so he would no longer feel so abandoned.

No longer did he have to wonder because his prayer had been answered, and Lume had found him, and his world had flipped upside-down but in all of the right ways.

Now he wasn’t alone. He had a friend. He had a pack.

He had Lume. And that was all he needed.

(This didn’t take me nearly as long to write as I thought it would and I also adore this chapter/epilogue with a burning passion)

- President Loki :)

Waning Unity

Chapter Twenty-five

Loneliness chewed at Fraser like a starved beast finally successful in catching prey as he trekked through the sunbaked sands, watching as the sun crested the horizon and threw glorious bands of color every which way, turning the dark night sky to vibrant blue, streaked with near every color on the spectrum. The sounds of nighttime beetles died away as light pierced through the surrounding shadows and washed over Fraser’s dust-colored fur, giving light to yet another day of desolation.

Fraser ascended up a rocky incline, scrambling his way up onto a small plateau, tucking himself out of the sun’s rays in the shadows of a rock pillar, laying down with a sigh as he laid his head on his paws and watched the desert below.

It didn’t make any sense to him. He knew these desert plains better than anything else, so why did he feel so lost? Not the kind of lost he had felt in the past, the kind that gripped his heart with loneliness, the kind that he concealed by burying it underneath layers of delusional ideas that his pack would return. No, this time it was different. This time it was like a pit, and no matter how many lies that he told himself, it couldn’t be filled.

As hard as it was to admit, he missed Lume more than anything in the world. And he just couldn’t find out why.

Movement below caught his eye and he looked down from his high place, watching a pair of deer make their way across the rocky plains with a young fawn at their heels. As he watched them walk, hooves scraping against stones and echoing up to Fraser’s ears, he felt the loneliness inside of him swell. Never before had he wished for a family, never considered the possibility of claiming a mate or producing pups of his own. Even now, the idea was one of untrodden territory, dangerous and unfamiliar. But the mere thought of having someone, anyone, there at his side was enough to make him consider anything.

His chin sank back down to rest on his paws and he watched silently as the deer made their way across the sands, the fur of his tail trembling in the breeze and moving it for the first time in weeks. How he longed to feel it thump against the ground again. When had he wagged last?

Right. When Lume made him smile.

Why couldn’t he keep his thoughts away from her?

The breeze carried a familiar scent to Fraser’s nostrils as he breathed inward and his head lifted faster than it had in a long time. He turned his head and looked in the direction from which the scent came, searching the horizon as hopefulness grew inside of him. He pushed himself to his feet, scanning the surrounding sands and rocky outcroppings until finally, there; the shape of a white wolf approaching.

It was Lume!

Fraser watched her for a moment longer before turning and running across the plateau, following his well-trodden trail and descending the pebble-layered slope, slipping over loose sand as he rushed down. He rounded the rocky corner, inhaling deeply to ensure that he was still going the right way, falling into a dead sprint as he pelted in pursuit of the white wolf.

Rounding a corner, he came upon a small incline, watching her white tail disappear over the top. He hurried up after her, pausing once he reached the top, paws sinking into the sand. “Lume!” he called down to her.

It was Lume. It was Lume. It was LUME!

(Dude this hurts)

- President Loki

Waning Unity

Chapter Fourteen

(On time like it's SUPPOSED to be ... okay lemme stop throwing shade lol.)

The blue essence that had filled Wildflower began to unravel, branching off as wisps circled her body. Lume tilted her head

back and allowed a long, low howl. There weren’t many pack traditions she participated in, but howling at the passing of a

wolf had always been something she’d done, for reasons unlike those of common wolves.

Death provided a different spectacle for her than it did others. To a pack, the group howling in the presence of death might

have been a mournful goodbye, but in her eyes, howling had always been the wings needed to carry essence from the living

world into the Forever Grounds. Even howling just now and Fraser’s voice joining in, the strands of blue essence clinging to

Wildflower’s body snapped their tethers and climbed into the sky on the winds.

Her wisp of blue joined the aurora of varying shades of blue pulsating in the night sky, a gathering of wolves in the Forever

Grounds as they gathered to welcome Wildflower to their number.

It seemed fitting that something so sad should have a beauty to accompany it. It was a shame wolves like Fraser could not

see as she saw.

With the last fragment of Wildflower gone, her body faded into a hazy gray indistinguishable from the soil and vegetation

around her. Lume’s coat lightened back to pure white without an essence to affect her anymore, and she could feel herself

grow smaller as her heavy, imposing nature faded away to the empty shell she had been before.

————————————

“So you do sleep?”

Lume cracked open her eyes and lifted her gaze to see Fraser hovering over her. His usual cheeriness still hadn’t returned,

but the silence had likely been harsher on him, Wildflower’s absence being glaringly evident now. “I need to heal,” she

murmured, turning her head to look at the gashes in her side. Then she looked at the matching claw-marks that trailed down

Fraser’s haunches. “And so do you.”

Fraser didn’t protest, simply padded a bit further away and plopped down, gnawing on something Lume couldn’t make out in

the dark. “Do you eat?” he asked with the tilt of his head. Lume stared at him a moment, then let her gaze travel to

Wildflower’s body, tufts of ripped flesh and fur slicked with blood outlined by the moonlight. For whatever reason, neither had

buried her yet. “Under the proper circumstances, I eat anything.”

She looked back at Fraser after a moment to see his face contorted with disgust as he immediately understood what she

was insinuating. She laid her head back down. “These are not the proper circumstances,” she assured him quietly. He

averted his gaze and then looked down at the object he had been gnawing. “These bulbs are pretty good. They come from

the roots of those golden flowers over there.” He tossed his nose in the direction of a diverse patch of gray flowers nearby.

She started to explain her ‘colorblindness,’ but decided she wasn’t in the mood for a thousand questions right now. “Thank

you,” she said quietly, shutting her eyes again.

“Lume?” Fraser called again, breaking the silence once more. She opened her eyes in a silent answer. “Thank you … for all

your help and everything, but … well, I don’t think I was meant to bring my pack back together. No matter what I try, it seems

like things aren’t going well.”

“You’ve only had two encounters,” she pointed out.

“I know, but …”

“If you wanted to quit, you would have just let that mountain lion kill you. You didn’t. You beat it with a stick. A stick, Fraser.”

There was quiet. “That was before Wildflower was …” he trailed off.

“Sleep, Fraser,” Lume said, more of a command than a suggestion. “In the morning, I’ll find a new trail, and you can decide

whether or not you’ll come with me.”

Fraser started to speak again, but Lume shushed him with a look before shutting her eyes.

~CL1 (Sorry, was too lazy to fix all the weird spacing on this one.)

Waning Unity

Chapter Twenty-Four

She wished she could take it back. She wanted to turn and go back to the river. What if's rang through her head constantly: What if Fraser didn't survive his injuries? What if the wolves from over the river came back and tore him and everyone else to pieces? What if she couldn't make it on her own? That question haunted Lume the most, though she wasn't sure why. She had wandered a life of isolation for as long as she could remember, so why was it eating her alive now? She looked down at the scar of essence that stretched down her face and shoulder. It alternated between red and blue, while the rest of her remained blank white. She wasn't sure what it meant, but she had a good idea of what was causing it.

She stopped walking. Why didn't she just go back? Fraser would forgive her, surely. And as long as she avoided interactions with wolves with red essence, all would be well, right?

'You can't go back,' the other Lume in her head reminded her. 'There will be terrible suffering should you return.'

She bowed her head, once again resigned to her lonely fate. Perhaps it was simply better this way. A rustling in the nearby bushes threw her gaze back upwards. A pair of glinting eyes stared at her from the dark in a way that was all too familiar. Before she could place them, they stepped forward, revealing the same mountain lion that had claimed Wildflower's life, as evidenced by the familiar scars lining its body. Lume tensed as it stepped towards her, but it stopped just out of her reach, staring at her with a look of what seemed to be peace. She could have sworn she saw the slightest tint of brilliant blue inside of it. "You seem to be able to do it," she said to the big cat, unsure if it understood her. "You live a life of solidarity without issue. How?" As if to prove her immediately wrong, there was more rustling behind the cougar. A trio of cubs galloped and tripped over one another before settling next to their father.

A light went on in Lume's head then. Even the most solitary of creatures couldn't live their entire lives on their own. She didn't truly have to keep her distance, did she? Fraser had specifically asked her not to leave him, and here she was thinking he would reject her. The mountain lion gave her a small nod and a slow blink as if reading her thoughts and urging her to go on. She dipped her head in thanks to the cat before standing and turning in the direction that went back towards the river.

'You cannot go back,' the voice urged. Lume hesitated, but only for a second before taking a step forward. She had made her choice.

Almost immediately, the scar of colored essence on her pelt went deep red and began crawling over the rest of her fur. Her back arched in a permanent attack stance and her fangs pointed further from her jaw in an unnatural manner. It was then Lume realized she couldn't move, or rather, she couldn't control her movements. Her paws turned back and launched her forward. Her jaws opened, splitting the skin at the ends to unhinge it further than it should have.

It wasn't Lume that snatched one of the fleeing cubs and ripped its head from its body. It wasn't Lume that grabbed another and smashed it against the trunk of a nearby tree until its head was a mush of shattered skull fragments and shredded muscle and brain matter. It wasn't Lume that fought off the attacks from the furious panther, coming to protect its young.

She watched as her body pressed the cat's flailing limbs to the ground, forcing them down until they snapped. She watched while her jaw unhinged and snapped down on the mountain lion's head in one bite before tearing away from the decapitated corpse. She tried to take back control in vain as her eyes stared down the last surviving cub. She tried to force the word, "Run" from her lips, but her mouth refused to cooperate with her brain. She was filled with relief when her body turned away from the small creature, letting it escape deeper into the brush.

There was a moment of stillness as she tried to figure out what was happening, and then, in the silence that followed, the voice spoke. 'You really should have just listened.'

In that instant, Lume knew that this inner self was not her protector, it was her programming; a sect of her mind designated to keep her a lone wanderer for the rest of her days. It would do whatever was needed to keep her in the cycle of sojourning she was meant to exist in, even taking control of her body in a full autopilot. All of the warnings the voice had given before weren't warnings, they were threats, all alluding to this horrific turn.

And then another realization hit. So long as Fraser lived, she would always have a reason to ignore that programming and go back, so when her body turned back to the trail of essence prints that led the way back to Fraser, she knew immediately what her mutinous body was doing, and she began fighting harder than ever to make it stop.

(Yeah... besties)

~CL1

Waning Unity

Chapter Twenty-one

The darkness felt so good.

It enveloped him. It covered him. It stirred all around him like hot desert winds.

The desert. Oh, the desert. What a desolate place. He had been so, so alone. His heart had been slowly dissolving away. It broke, fractured, fell apart until there was nothing left but a hollow shelf of what he had been. And what was a wolf without their heart?

He had known from the beginning that his pack would never come back. It wasn’t the loneliness itself that had broken him, it was the knowledge that the loneliness would never be healed. He would be alone forever, and he would die alone, and the darkness would close in on him and eat away at him until he was nothing.

Except he wasn’t nothing. He wasn’t alone anymore. Because of Lume.

Lume.

The thought of the she-wolf ripped him out of the darkness that enfolded him. He sucked in a desperate gasp, thrusting himself to his feet. “Lume!” he cried, though it came out as a ruptured whine. His legs buckled and he fell back into the ground as burning pain engulfed him, throat tightening and cutting off his air flow. Instinctually he began coughing and retching, stomach bile mixed with blood running from his jaws.

Somewhere behind him he heard his name, carried on a fearful voice, but his gagging filled his ears and he couldn’t focus on anything else. The pale, sun-kissed fur of Milkweed leaned over him, her body brushing against his as he fought against his own lungs to breathe, eyes wide. Tears ran their way down his face as the convulsion continued, stabbing claws of pain through his entire body.

“Breathe, Fraser,” Milkweed’s voice told him from somewhere overhead, voice filled with concern. He could feel his sister’s fear, but more evident was guilt. Not her guilt, he managed to process as he vomited up more blood. Someone else’s.

The form of Lume appeared beside him, pale fur almost white with the faintest trace of blue, except for the stripe of sky blue that weaved from her face down to her shoulder and along her side. Fraser managed to pull his eyes up and look at her, and as their eyes met he found that the she-wolf’s fear was greater than Milkweed’s. “Fraser,” she whispered, voice trembling with worry and guilt.

Everything was on fire. He felt as if the pain, the convulsion, the burning would go on forever. But just when it seemed to hit its peak, all at once his body stilled, muscles relaxing and freeing him from the potentially deadly hold. He panted heavily, open-mouthed, sides lifting and sinking as he regained his breath, dizziness overtaking him. His weight sank into the forest floor, everything growing limp as his eyelids sagged. He couldn’t smother a pitiful, pain-driven whimper.

“Fraser,” Lume repeated his name, moving to lay in front of him with her nose level to his. “Fraser, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

He let out a weak, shaky moan in the form of a response, straining to look at her. Milkweed’s fur swished against his side before she turned to move. “I’m going to get him food,” her voice said, wobbly, as if Fraser was underwater. “Be careful, okay? I’ll be right back.”

Silence followed, the only sound being the wheeze which followed Fraser’s every breath, straining his lungs to a point where he wondered if death would be a far better option. The darkness had been so soft. So warm.

“Fraser,” Lume’s voice whispered finally, after what felt like an eternity passed between the pair. “I am so sorry.”

Fraser groaned out an inaudible response, every piece in his body weak and heavy with burdensome weight. He felt himself begin to tremble as a chilled wind hummed through the treetops, a mixture of cold and his current status catching up to him. He could faintly hear the rustle of Lume’s fur as he moved, but his eyelids were too heavy to force them open and look at her. His heart thumped inside of his ears as a moment passed, when all at once the powerful strength of the ethereal wolf enveloped him, fur brushing against his as she moved to lay down alongside him. Though a simple gesture, he felt his heart swell within his chest. It had been so long, far too long, since he had been able to lay in the company of another wolf. One who cared for him.

“I’m so sorry,” Lume’s fractured voice repeated in a hushed tone. Fraser moaned out a shaky answer, giving up on speaking and instead allowing his muscles to untense completely as he dipped away back into unconsciousness, the vibration of Lume’s heart against his side comforting him to the point of rest.

(They’re besties)

- President Loki