THE MORNING AFTER
The pack woke slowly.
In the way of communities that have been through something significant and are allowing themselves the specific luxury of a morning that doesn't require immediate action. No crisis on the boundary. No urgent dispatch from the council. No threat at the edge of the territory.
Just morning.
I woke up early as I always did and lay in the quiet of the main house and felt the territory the way I felt it every morning, the specific conversation between the seal and the ground, the boundary lines present and stable, the four packs of the eastern treaty network humming their distinct frequencies in the wide geography of the connected land.
And new, at the furthest edge, the fourth territory. The Draeven. Their unsealed wildness now joined to the network
