(Kaelen)
The woman at the border has silver hair.
Not gray — silver, the real kind, the kind that catches light like metal. She's tall, and she holds herself the way people do when they've spent a long time being looked at and have made peace with it. The gate guard's message said a woman requesting an audience with the alpha, and the second message, the one that came thirty seconds later, said Sora says to come yourself.
Sora doesn't send that message for ordinary visitors.
I'm at the border gate in eight minutes.
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She's standing on the outside of it. Not demanding entry — waiting, her hands loose at her sides, her face arranged in something that reads as patient and probably isn't. She's older than me by maybe fifteen years, maybe more. The silver hair makes age harder to read.
