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Description

29th jun 2021: applying to dotw again; keeping my fingers crossed!

BASIC INFORMATION

Name: Elysium
Age: Young Adult
Gender: Male
Height: 33.5”
Weight: 90lbs
Build:
Slightly short with a thin, fine-boned face, one would expect Elysium to be built like a runner - that is, until your gaze drifts down to his paws, which seem big and a little blocky, lending you the impression that he might be inclined towards fighting. Thick fur around his cheeks and the nape of his neck serve to bulk up his figure some, but there truly isn’t very much muscle underneath. This puts the wolf in something of an odd position; he looks like he could either be decent at or absolutely terrible at fighting or hunting.

His coat is a pale grey with a very slight blueish hue; darker and paler (nearly off-white markings) run across his body in an otherwise expected fashion. Perhaps the most striking detail on his fur, though, is the warmer grey streak that cuts across his back, which serves to break up the monotony of his cold hues a little.

However, El’s most distinct feature is his eyes. Yellow in colour and with incredibly small irises, this quality has often led to him being pegged as intimidating even when he doesn’t meant to be. He tends to stare a lot, too, which has often been misinterpreted as him glaring.
Territory: Aryn
Family:
Lis (mother, presumed alive)
Rheese (father, presumed alive)
Rank: Omega

PERSONA

Personality:

overview.
El is an affable, harmless wolf. Though he comes across as enigmatic or intimidating, he’s probably more scared of you than you are of him. His anxiety and need to blend in mean that his talents take a while to coax out, but once it is done others will find that he is both clever and diligent. Surprisingly, the young wolf is staunch when it comes to his morals, and startlingly so.

clever, tactical, but avoidant.
Though by no means a genius, El is good at retaining information and applying it to other areas, though he’s got yet to fully register this trait for himself. And while El’s first
instinct is to run headlong in the other direction at the first sign of an issue, upon being convinced that a solution needs to be found, the pale wolf tends to sharpen up. He’s quite good at coming up with a plan and making inferences - it’s just that it sometimes requires encouraging.

patient, diligent and practical, yet uninspired and conformist.
Elysium is a hard and earnest worker who expects great things from himself - he just doesn’t know what thing, yet. He can only hunt solo and has only rudimentary knowledge on herbs; Elysium fears that he may not ever discover his true calling or a propensity towards a certain subject. Despite his desire to be good at something, though, Elysium is not particularly ambitious: he doesn’t have a grand design or a need to become something other than “good at a job”; he doesn’t wish to be Alpha or have his name known far and wide. Like any other young wolf, his primary focus is acceptance by his peers and pack - which, though in some ways seems practical and realistic, is also rather conformist and uninspiring. He sees no problem in blending in (or in being a role model for the generic wolf) and this has bled into the other aspects of his life as well. Resultantly, his imagination has been a bit lacklustre. He has a fondness for listening to a tall tale or looking at a new invention, but he’s definitely not a person who would tell or make such things. Creativity takes a bit longer to come to him; he sees things as what they are first before considering what they can be.

friendly but aloof, almost enigmatic.
Speak to El and he’ll always give you a reply no matter how short on time he is; ask him for help and he’ll see what he can do. He’s happy to make some small talk, but the wolf has an aloof disposition - not voluntarily, he’s simply always been like this. Because he rarely speaks unless spoken to, and rarely sees the point in giving personal details unless asked, he appears to be slightly enigmatic. He’s not exactly cagey about his history, but he seldom shares what’s on his mind.

anxious, genuine, and (rarely) backhanded.
While El’s cool, aloof front and scary disposition have often led others to lead otherwise, the young adult is actually considerably anxious and craves the approval of his peers. He’s able to manage it in day-to-day life, but when expected to perform in front of others, he stumbles, especially when it comes to hunting. This anxiety is why he’s also normally the wallflower brand of nice instead of outspoken or bold; his brain-to-mouth filter functions with the mantra, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. That said, he’s never fake about his niceties: the wolf resents lying (that is, if you don’t count lying by omission) and all that he says has some elements of truth to them. Genuineness is something he does value (though not consciously), and in deeper friendships, it is likely something he wants to focus on. However, while Elysium would never lie about being unhappy, he does tend to repress it in the hopes that distress will go away eventually (it doesn’t). What results are very rare, impulsive one-liners that are vaguely backhanded. He often feels horrible and anxious over these and will apologize nearly immediately, though.

sympathetic and compassionate, but with a slight vindictive streak.
Though not a bleeding-heart, El still has a very strong sense of sympathy to him. He is resentful of those who hurt the weak; his immediate response to those who are hurt or in danger is to seek ways to remove them from the situation. Those who have wronged him before, however, may not receive treatment as quickly. El would never intentionally leave someone to suffer, but the parts of him that are more vindictive do tend to delay the instinct to help from kicking in. Even when helping those he’s had feuds with, it’s extremely begrudgingly and he can’t help but have a bit of a “ha! karmic retribution” instinctively flash through his head, though he’ll feel some small measure of guilt afterwards.

dependent, sheltered, quasi-naive.
Sheltered both physically and emotionally, Elysium has yet to fully develop his independence - he isn’t very good at surviving without the help of a pack, let alone satisfying his own craving for approval. Though he has just enough wariness to survive in the outside world and is well aware that there are wolves with less-than savoury ideals, he tends to trust a bit quicker than other wolves. His first inferences tend to be whether or not a wolf likes him rather than whether or not a wolf is of scrupulous character.

though conformist - morally steadfast.
In some ways, this seems unexpected; after all, El’s a conformist, isn’t he? In many ways, he is: he has a desire to do well, to be accepted by his peers and developing the same skill sets. But though his anxiousness and eagerness to please seems pitted directly against this, El is steadfast in his morals. When he has an opinion on something that could impact lives and he believes he is right, it will take a lot of effort and time to change it. The extent to which he can dig his heels in to prove a point is frankly startling; he can be stubborn and determined to a point that it seems to border on dogma.

Pre-Group History:

Three borders marked by steep cliffs; the fourth, a furious river: this was Hales, a pack who believed itself one step away from Paradise.

It wasn’t, of course - its leaders were as flawed as any other, inclined to nepotism and favouritism. But they also knew that they were nothing without their subjects, and so each generation was learned and competent in the ways of governance. Getting things done properly was their specialty, and the pack had any discontentment sated by warm dens, dignified retirements and proper education.

There was one problem, though - a problem that generations upon generations of Halean rulers could never fix, no matter what they tried, and it was their lacklustre hunting grounds. Their territory served them modestly most seasons, but winters left them thin, even after trying everything: expanding the territory, increasing hunting lessons; there was a story that many generations ago, one ruler had forced his wolves to fast for two seasons in the hope that the prey would have time to recover from their hunting. Eventually the Halean wolves resigned themselves to hungry sleeps on frostbitten nights, where the walls of their reinforced dens shielded them from the cold that would have otherwise pierced right through the skin draped over their bony frames.

A stranger would ask why they had not left. Truth be told, there had always been talk of leaving, yet that was all it was: talk. To the Halean wolves, their homeland was sacred - sacred even though they had long forgotten why their ancestors had claimed the land as their own. With cliffs on three sides of their border and a river on the last, they liked to believe it was easy to defend.

They would never know that their ancestors had settled here because they had been forced to, having been driven out of their old home by rival packs that had long had their names lost to the annals of time. Hales, it seemed, would soon suffer their fate.

-

“Tha’s a goof cafch, El,” said Lis, with a bone in her maw. She’d been gnawing on the same one for the past two days. Her pale-coated son turned, the silvers in his pelt strikingly reminiscent of his mother’s own.

“Waf it, ma?” In his maw was a leaf made ragged by his playing. He clamped it in his mouth and dropped it at Lis’s feet, hoping it would earn him more praise. “I was practicing my stalking.”

No doubt an attempt at emulating Rheese. Lis was grateful that he had taken well to fathering Elysium; she and Rheese had never expected a son to be born from what they’d both believed was a quick fling. It was common when you were in the same occupation, and Lis had been quite fond of working together with him as Hunters. Rheese had been showing El how to do so - it was only expected that the son of a Hunter should be one himself - and she was grateful that the boy seemed to have some kind of inclination towards it.

“Ma,” El said, his voice sharper this time as he pawed at the leaf. “You’re not looking at it.”

El’s gaze dropped down to the leaf once more as the bone in her mouth clattered dully to the ground. She didn’t know what more to say about it, and eventually settled on, “You’ll make a good Hunter like your father.”

El bounced a little, the childlike innocence in him lending him a discomfiting enthusiasm. But perhaps that had been the fault of Lis and Rheese for shielding him from the truth of sleepless nights spent stalking the same herd, only to lose it because some idiot decided that then was the best possible time to sneeze.

“We sure do have a lot of hunters, don’t we? Why’s that? Like, like,” El’s brow furrowed, “like you and pa, and Theo’s ma and pa, and, well, Uly’s pa is a Healer but his ma’s also - ”

“Yes, I know,” Lis said. She’d gotten the memo. She paused once more, uncertain how much of the truth she should reveal to him. It was selfish, she knew - selfish that she still wanted to hide him from the world’s truths if only he could retain his carefree innocence. Eventually, she told him, “Well, it’s because we have to get enough to eat. Prey’s scarce, where we live.”

“Sca...sca...scarce?”

As Lis opened her mouth to explain, El interrupted her.

“Scarce, that word means, like, few, right?”

“You’re right.”

“Why’s the prey scarce?”

“That’s just how our territory is.”

“Why don’t we find new land?”

Oh, to be young and free - free of dogma and emotional attachment beyond one’s own flesh and blood. Lis herself was a younger she-wolf whose mind entertained leaving more than the average wolf, yet even she was all too aware of the dangers that lurked at the Halean borders and beyond. Years of seldom venturing beyond their grounds had left their knowledge of the world severely outdated, and the stories of feats that had been achieved outside of it had become more fiction than fact.

Lukewarmly, “I don’t know, El.” She curled her long, wispy tail around her son and tugged him closer to her. “But I do know if you want to become a good Hunter, you’ve got to get your rest.”

El screwed up his face. “But Theo’s ma - ”

Firmly, “Now.”

El flattened his ears and slunk into the nest.

-

Black - black in his peripheries. The rustling of leaves and the crackle of branches.

“Up there!” El’s head swung sharply upwards; he jumped - but not fast enough. The crack of bone, then Rheese’s large paws hit the dirt. In his father’s jaws was a limp blackbird.

“Well spotted,” the older wolf said, voice muffled by feathers. From behind El, someone huffed.

“C’mon, Rheese, it’s not like the boy caught the damn thing,” Jay said. The grey-pelted Hunter had been Rheese’s mentor; four seasons older than El’s father, he was harder to please. “You praise them when they don’t do shit, they end up soft. That’s why Hales is always hungry - we don’t have good Hunters.”

“We’re not expecting them to catch anything. Today’s just supposed to be a demonstration, Jay.”

Jay shouldered past Rheese. “Pah. You’re too light on your kid.” Elysium, tail fluffed up in anxiety, watched as his father stared at the older wolf. He tried not to think about the other juveniles’ gazes, which were probably boring into his back now.

The silver-coated juvenile returned from the hunting demonstration with a conflicted look in his eye - pride from his father’s praise, yet disappointment from Jay’s words. From behind, a pale wolf - Heron - caught up to him.

“You don’t have to take what Jay says to heart, you know,” Heron said. Heron was Ulysseus’s father; though the former was a Healer, he had gone to watch the hunting demonstration with his son. “He’s just...getting old. That’s never a good feeling. Although,” Heron lifted his back leg up to scratch his ear, “have you ever considered not being a hunter?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve got sharp senses. Good sense of smell; good memory, too. You would probably be able to find herbs real easy.”

“Trying to recruit more Healers again?” That was Rheese. “Come on, Heron. There aren’t enough of us Hunters as it is.” His tone was even but Elysium knew that Rheese’s patience had its limits.

“I was just putting forward a suggestion.”

“He wants to be a Hunter. Don’t you, boy?”

Elysium straightened. He had never really thought about wanting to be a Hunter; it seemed just the normal thing to do. Healing, on the other hand, seemed just that bit more intriguing - but it wasn’t like that was his dream job, either.

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, finally; an echo of his mother in the way he measured his replies - not lying yet somehow telling the other wolf exactly what they wanted to hear.

“That’s my boy,” Rheese said and smiled as he beckoned Elysium away from Heron. It was the smile he wore when he thought he had proven a point.

-

Becoming a Hunter wasn’t so much a ceremony as it was a part of life. After all, it didn’t take any sort of feat to become one.

Elysium and his friends were granted their new positions when they were about a year old, and that marked the end of the hunting demonstrations and lessons that they had been given. Now it was time for them to prove themselves during the real thing.

They started off easy; going off in small teams to hunt smaller game, but once the older Halean hunters were assured of the younger wolves’ skill, it was time for them to use it all in a full-fledged pack-wide hunt.

Elysium saw them first - a small herd of caribou in the dense woods headed towards the small Halean meadow that was the only pasture upon which grazers could feed.

“There,” he mouthed, using his tail to tap the shoulder of the wolf beside him, and soon the message made its way towards Rheese - who was one of the leaders of the hunting party. He signaled for four wolves to circle round the rear of the caribou so that they could drive them into an ambush. The rest of them would focus on targeting a member of the herd - Rheese gestured towards an older doe.

El watched as the four wolves made their way towards the back of the herd, flattering his ears in an attempt to stop the blood from roaring in them. He couldn’t. Shaking his head violently, he was jabbed harshly in the ribs by his neighbour, “Don’t blow this for us, man!”

Right. He couldn’t. The pack had to be fed and El was certain that the sound would subside once the hunt was over. The pale wolf tensed his muscle and waited for his father’s signal -

“Go!”

Then, the thunderous sound of dozens of paws hitting the grass. The earth underpaw seemed to shake, and it was all El could do to run, run, run alongside his packmates. Clouds of dust rose from the soil as the caribou began rushing towards them; then, realising their mistake, they tried to turn around. Beside him he could see Theo clinging onto a hoof; Jay, who was on the back of a caribou (El couldn’t tell if it was the same caribou, did it matter if it was the same caribou? He wasn’t sure anymore).

El took a deep breath, tried to find something - but he couldn’t, and the sound of a dozen wolves moving, the herd stampeding - it was too much. He saw a dark shape, barrelled into it - only to realise, as the dust settled, that it was Rheese.

“What the - ” Rheese pushed Elysium off him, coughed, then opened his mouth, about to confront him - only to realise that it was his son. “El? What were you doing?”

“I’m - I’m sorry,” Elysium said. The younger wolf took a step back - anything to distance himself from the shock in Rheese’s gaze that he knew would soon turn into disappointment. “I - I thought you were one of them.”

“Have you ever seen a caribou that size, boy?” Jay spat some blood out of his mouth. “You straight-up messed up is what I’m seeing.”

“I mean...maybe a calf could be that size.” Theo offered, but it wasn’t much consolation, especially not to Jay.

“Leave him alone,” Rheese said, his voice nearly a rumble. He bridged the distance between him and Jay and looked the older wolf in the eye. “He’ll do better next time.”

Jay narrowed his eyes - and stepped away.

“Next time, we might not even end up with anything,” the older wolf said, using his muzzle to gesture to the older doe that Rheese had pointed out earlier. She was small, thin, but at least the pack wouldn’t be going hungry, and that was enough. “Listen, Rheese - whatever your relationship is, whether it’s your father or brother or kid - you know we can’t afford screwups. If the Alphas keep making allowances, we might actually lose someone when winter comes. I’ve seen it happen before you were born.”

“I’m not having this discussion with you now,” Rheese said, but his voice had lost its edge. Instead it sounded tired. For some reason, that was worse to El. Now that his father’s aggression had subsided, every other wolf’s gaze was locked on him - an amalgam of pity and sympathy and disappointment. Some wore expressions of frustration.

“Let’s get cleaned up and get the caribou moving.”

-

It was supposed to be better than a job change. The wolves wouldn’t gossip quite as much if El was transferred to the Lone Hunters - a group of Hunters that set out solo in search of smaller prey like rabbits and birds. It stung, watching the other Hunters leave camp together while throwing him unreadable looks, but he could at least pretend it didn’t bother him when he returned carrying home some measly prey item for his packmates to share.

Why couldn’t he hunt in a group like the rest of them? Elysium’s sleepless nights were plagued by this singular question as he began gnawing on bones like his mother had when he was young. It was a common pastime among Hale’s adults - something to keep their jaws working, to trick their stomachs into pretending that they were eating, when in reality they were uncertain how much longer they’d have to wait for their next meal. Sometimes he would watch pups play in the sunshine, oblivious to hunger, just like he had been. He would wear a look on his face that he was certain was adult condescension.

Come to think of it, his mother had made that face to him, to. But even that was better than the disappointment etched on her muzzle when El had returned from that hunt.

Elysium would spend months dwelling on that, but soon after, there would be someone else to think about.

-

The Stranger arrived without warning, with a deep gash along the side of their shoulder. Two scouts had led them back home, where they were treated by Healers and given time to rest.

The leaders of Hales welcomed the Stranger, for they had not had many visitors to their borders, let alone one who would stay with them - and so when the ghostly-coloured wolf deigned to give the pack their name, the pack grudgingly accepted it. Any wariness was quickly dissipated by the fascinating things the Stranger told them about, though - all sorts of new information on creatures they had only heard stories of. Snakes, for instance, were not found in Halean territory, and stories of them had always stated that they were the size of a wolf. Yet the Stranger claimed that they were no bigger than a wolf’s forepaw.

The pale wolf didn’t just bring insight into creatures, though - they spoke of strange plants that their Healers had never heard of before: the Golden Teardrop, named for the colour and the shape of its leaves; the Dark Dream, named for its ability to make wolves delirious and tired - but the most fascinating among them was the Crimson Night. The Stranger said that they had been looking for it for a very long time, and that it was supposedly a cure-all for every malady a wolf could ever experience.

The Stranger also enjoyed speaking to the Healers on plants they already knew about, though - and suggested new ways to use and store them. El found the Stranger fascinating, and though some more skeptical wolves kept their pups away from their stories, the silver male didn’t have his parents breathing down his neck all the time. He enjoyed discussing things with the Stranger and with the Healers, and absorbed some knowledge through osmosis. For a while that kept his mind off the life of a Lone Hunter, but eventually even the white wolf had to leave.

El was there when they left, and a part of him wished that he had gone with the Stranger. But it was a very small part. The Stranger’s stories had made him realise just how ill-equipped that his entire pack was to deal with the outside world, and much as he was bored and cynical of Halean life, it also had a safety to it.

He had had the same epiphany his mother had.

-

Three borders marked by steep cliffs, a fourth by a raging river - yet even that didn’t make the Halean wolves impervious to danger.

A sickness came on the heels of winter, nipping at their weak: first it was Jay, who had been close to retirement. He had coughed for days, but then began spitting out a green bile that not even their most experienced Healers had seen before.

It was slow-spreading, thankfully, but it still spread - then it was Heron, and then the Alpha’s son. Eventually, the ill wolves were left in camp with the healers and the scent of their own sick, while the rest of them made camp elsewhere. Some of the sick wolves who had been able to fight the illness were able to rejoin their ranks, but the shortage of Hunters and the shifting of wolves to and fro to help with healing, ensure adequate hunting, and to prevent spreading turned to be difficult for even Hales’s leaders to navigate. It was made worse by the fact that the leader’s son refused to get better, instilling in the patriarch a deep sense of worry. The Prince was the heir to the throne, the pack’s future - how would they survive without him leading it?

(In this pack, few wolves had the foresight to think that Hales had barely had a future left.)

The Healers had to stay to treat the sick and the leader’s son, the Scouts had to ensure that they remained protected, and the Hunters had to make sure the pack was fed. Yet there were so many Hunters that the leader of Hales believed that surely he could spare a few.

Elysium and three other wolves - none of which were particularly great hunters - met with the leader of Hales after nearly a season of the pack being afflicted with this mysterious disease. The old wolf claimed he had chosen them for their abilities, though El believed they were chosen because they were the four deadweights among the healthy wolves; four spares who wouldn’t be missed if they were gone. They were to travel north, south, east, and west in search of anything or anyone that could help: the Stranger, a pack who had heard of this illness, the fabled Crimson Night - anything. There was no discussing this, and they would be leaving in two sunrises. That was enough time to say goodbye.

“I’ll be back,” he wanted to promise his parents when he told them the news, but the words faltered in Elysium’s voice as he attempted to say them. There was really no knowing, was there? The pale wolf couldn’t find it in himself to make such a fragile promise, and though the look on Rheese’s face was grim, it seemed as though Lis could parse the meaning hidden behind his sentences.

“Please be safe.” She stepped forward and buried her muzzle into the fur that cascaded down El’s cheek, knowing that it may very well be the last time she could ever do it - not because she had no faith in his survival, but because she knew there was no point in him returning to a place like Hales; even if he didn’t know it now, he’d realise it in time. Lis would have gone with him, but she feared her presence and her own lack of experience would put more pressure on him.

“I will,” he said. Two dawns later, he left. Crossed the raging river with the help of a tree that had met its end at the hands of a ferocious storm, resulting in it uprooting to create a bridge. Unknowingly, it was a storm that heralded a new age - the end of Hales. The beginning of what, who knew?

-

Elysium traveled for months. Life was easier, in some ways - being a decent solo hunter, getting to keep what he killed helped ease the sensation of a half-empty stomach that he had grown accustomed to, though the feeling that he had no one to share his life with ate away at him to a point where he couldn’t find it in himself to eat regularly.

Avoiding danger, however, was another task in its entirety. He could shy away from wolves that were decidedly not the stranger, but he was seeing things that he had only heard of: animals and plants and strange bugs. He nearly got bit by what he thought was a snake once; it was lucky he stepped out of reach in time before pelting off in the opposite direction.

After nearly two months of searching, though, he came to realise that it’d be fruitless without having some eyes and ears to help or at least point him in the correct direction.

(Even if they couldn’t provide that, he’d at least have someone to talk to - the silence threatened to deafen his mind, to render him an echo chamber of his own thoughts).

Then there was Aryn, a pack that seemed … all right, when he first scented them. They didn’t smell sick or bloodied and there was no indication that they would otherwise prove dangerous. Even if they were, well...Elysium would just have to find a way to get out of that situation. For now, the promise of companionship far outweighed the risks.

Group History: to be added

Other: tba

Description

29th jun 2021: applying to dotw again; keeping my fingers crossed!

BASIC INFORMATION

Name: Elysium
Age: Young Adult
Gender: Male
Height: 33.5”
Weight: 90lbs
Build:
Slightly short with a thin, fine-boned face, one would expect Elysium to be built like a runner - that is, until your gaze drifts down to his paws, which seem big and a little blocky, lending you the impression that he might be inclined towards fighting. Thick fur around his cheeks and the nape of his neck serve to bulk up his figure some, but there truly isn’t very much muscle underneath. This puts the wolf in something of an odd position; he looks like he could either be decent at or absolutely terrible at fighting or hunting.

His coat is a pale grey with a very slight blueish hue; darker and paler (nearly off-white markings) run across his body in an otherwise expected fashion. Perhaps the most striking detail on his fur, though, is the warmer grey streak that cuts across his back, which serves to break up the monotony of his cold hues a little.

However, El’s most distinct feature is his eyes. Yellow in colour and with incredibly small irises, this quality has often led to him being pegged as intimidating even when he doesn’t meant to be. He tends to stare a lot, too, which has often been misinterpreted as him glaring.
Territory: Aryn
Family:
Lis (mother, presumed alive)
Rheese (father, presumed alive)
Rank: Omega

PERSONA

Personality:

overview.
El is an affable, harmless wolf. Though he comes across as enigmatic or intimidating, he’s probably more scared of you than you are of him. His anxiety and need to blend in mean that his talents take a while to coax out, but once it is done others will find that he is both clever and diligent. Surprisingly, the young wolf is staunch when it comes to his morals, and startlingly so.

clever, tactical, but avoidant.
Though by no means a genius, El is good at retaining information and applying it to other areas, though he’s got yet to fully register this trait for himself. And while El’s first
instinct is to run headlong in the other direction at the first sign of an issue, upon being convinced that a solution needs to be found, the pale wolf tends to sharpen up. He’s quite good at coming up with a plan and making inferences - it’s just that it sometimes requires encouraging.

patient, diligent and practical, yet uninspired and conformist.
Elysium is a hard and earnest worker who expects great things from himself - he just doesn’t know what thing, yet. He can only hunt solo and has only rudimentary knowledge on herbs; Elysium fears that he may not ever discover his true calling or a propensity towards a certain subject. Despite his desire to be good at something, though, Elysium is not particularly ambitious: he doesn’t have a grand design or a need to become something other than “good at a job”; he doesn’t wish to be Alpha or have his name known far and wide. Like any other young wolf, his primary focus is acceptance by his peers and pack - which, though in some ways seems practical and realistic, is also rather conformist and uninspiring. He sees no problem in blending in (or in being a role model for the generic wolf) and this has bled into the other aspects of his life as well. Resultantly, his imagination has been a bit lacklustre. He has a fondness for listening to a tall tale or looking at a new invention, but he’s definitely not a person who would tell or make such things. Creativity takes a bit longer to come to him; he sees things as what they are first before considering what they can be.

friendly but aloof, almost enigmatic.
Speak to El and he’ll always give you a reply no matter how short on time he is; ask him for help and he’ll see what he can do. He’s happy to make some small talk, but the wolf has an aloof disposition - not voluntarily, he’s simply always been like this. Because he rarely speaks unless spoken to, and rarely sees the point in giving personal details unless asked, he appears to be slightly enigmatic. He’s not exactly cagey about his history, but he seldom shares what’s on his mind.

anxious, genuine, and (rarely) backhanded.
While El’s cool, aloof front and scary disposition have often led others to lead otherwise, the young adult is actually considerably anxious and craves the approval of his peers. He’s able to manage it in day-to-day life, but when expected to perform in front of others, he stumbles, especially when it comes to hunting. This anxiety is why he’s also normally the wallflower brand of nice instead of outspoken or bold; his brain-to-mouth filter functions with the mantra, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. That said, he’s never fake about his niceties: the wolf resents lying (that is, if you don’t count lying by omission) and all that he says has some elements of truth to them. Genuineness is something he does value (though not consciously), and in deeper friendships, it is likely something he wants to focus on. However, while Elysium would never lie about being unhappy, he does tend to repress it in the hopes that distress will go away eventually (it doesn’t). What results are very rare, impulsive one-liners that are vaguely backhanded. He often feels horrible and anxious over these and will apologize nearly immediately, though.

sympathetic and compassionate, but with a slight vindictive streak.
Though not a bleeding-heart, El still has a very strong sense of sympathy to him. He is resentful of those who hurt the weak; his immediate response to those who are hurt or in danger is to seek ways to remove them from the situation. Those who have wronged him before, however, may not receive treatment as quickly. El would never intentionally leave someone to suffer, but the parts of him that are more vindictive do tend to delay the instinct to help from kicking in. Even when helping those he’s had feuds with, it’s extremely begrudgingly and he can’t help but have a bit of a “ha! karmic retribution” instinctively flash through his head, though he’ll feel some small measure of guilt afterwards.

dependent, sheltered, quasi-naive.
Sheltered both physically and emotionally, Elysium has yet to fully develop his independence - he isn’t very good at surviving without the help of a pack, let alone satisfying his own craving for approval. Though he has just enough wariness to survive in the outside world and is well aware that there are wolves with less-than savoury ideals, he tends to trust a bit quicker than other wolves. His first inferences tend to be whether or not a wolf likes him rather than whether or not a wolf is of scrupulous character.

though conformist - morally steadfast.
In some ways, this seems unexpected; after all, El’s a conformist, isn’t he? In many ways, he is: he has a desire to do well, to be accepted by his peers and developing the same skill sets. But though his anxiousness and eagerness to please seems pitted directly against this, El is steadfast in his morals. When he has an opinion on something that could impact lives and he believes he is right, it will take a lot of effort and time to change it. The extent to which he can dig his heels in to prove a point is frankly startling; he can be stubborn and determined to a point that it seems to border on dogma.

Pre-Group History:

Three borders marked by steep cliffs; the fourth, a furious river: this was Hales, a pack who believed itself one step away from Paradise.

It wasn’t, of course - its leaders were as flawed as any other, inclined to nepotism and favouritism. But they also knew that they were nothing without their subjects, and so each generation was learned and competent in the ways of governance. Getting things done properly was their specialty, and the pack had any discontentment sated by warm dens, dignified retirements and proper education.

There was one problem, though - a problem that generations upon generations of Halean rulers could never fix, no matter what they tried, and it was their lacklustre hunting grounds. Their territory served them modestly most seasons, but winters left them thin, even after trying everything: expanding the territory, increasing hunting lessons; there was a story that many generations ago, one ruler had forced his wolves to fast for two seasons in the hope that the prey would have time to recover from their hunting. Eventually the Halean wolves resigned themselves to hungry sleeps on frostbitten nights, where the walls of their reinforced dens shielded them from the cold that would have otherwise pierced right through the skin draped over their bony frames.

A stranger would ask why they had not left. Truth be told, there had always been talk of leaving, yet that was all it was: talk. To the Halean wolves, their homeland was sacred - sacred even though they had long forgotten why their ancestors had claimed the land as their own. With cliffs on three sides of their border and a river on the last, they liked to believe it was easy to defend.

They would never know that their ancestors had settled here because they had been forced to, having been driven out of their old home by rival packs that had long had their names lost to the annals of time. Hales, it seemed, would soon suffer their fate.

-

“Tha’s a goof cafch, El,” said Lis, with a bone in her maw. She’d been gnawing on the same one for the past two days. Her pale-coated son turned, the silvers in his pelt strikingly reminiscent of his mother’s own.

“Waf it, ma?” In his maw was a leaf made ragged by his playing. He clamped it in his mouth and dropped it at Lis’s feet, hoping it would earn him more praise. “I was practicing my stalking.”

No doubt an attempt at emulating Rheese. Lis was grateful that he had taken well to fathering Elysium; she and Rheese had never expected a son to be born from what they’d both believed was a quick fling. It was common when you were in the same occupation, and Lis had been quite fond of working together with him as Hunters. Rheese had been showing El how to do so - it was only expected that the son of a Hunter should be one himself - and she was grateful that the boy seemed to have some kind of inclination towards it.

“Ma,” El said, his voice sharper this time as he pawed at the leaf. “You’re not looking at it.”

El’s gaze dropped down to the leaf once more as the bone in her mouth clattered dully to the ground. She didn’t know what more to say about it, and eventually settled on, “You’ll make a good Hunter like your father.”

El bounced a little, the childlike innocence in him lending him a discomfiting enthusiasm. But perhaps that had been the fault of Lis and Rheese for shielding him from the truth of sleepless nights spent stalking the same herd, only to lose it because some idiot decided that then was the best possible time to sneeze.

“We sure do have a lot of hunters, don’t we? Why’s that? Like, like,” El’s brow furrowed, “like you and pa, and Theo’s ma and pa, and, well, Uly’s pa is a Healer but his ma’s also - ”

“Yes, I know,” Lis said. She’d gotten the memo. She paused once more, uncertain how much of the truth she should reveal to him. It was selfish, she knew - selfish that she still wanted to hide him from the world’s truths if only he could retain his carefree innocence. Eventually, she told him, “Well, it’s because we have to get enough to eat. Prey’s scarce, where we live.”

“Sca...sca...scarce?”

As Lis opened her mouth to explain, El interrupted her.

“Scarce, that word means, like, few, right?”

“You’re right.”

“Why’s the prey scarce?”

“That’s just how our territory is.”

“Why don’t we find new land?”

Oh, to be young and free - free of dogma and emotional attachment beyond one’s own flesh and blood. Lis herself was a younger she-wolf whose mind entertained leaving more than the average wolf, yet even she was all too aware of the dangers that lurked at the Halean borders and beyond. Years of seldom venturing beyond their grounds had left their knowledge of the world severely outdated, and the stories of feats that had been achieved outside of it had become more fiction than fact.

Lukewarmly, “I don’t know, El.” She curled her long, wispy tail around her son and tugged him closer to her. “But I do know if you want to become a good Hunter, you’ve got to get your rest.”

El screwed up his face. “But Theo’s ma - ”

Firmly, “Now.”

El flattened his ears and slunk into the nest.

-

Black - black in his peripheries. The rustling of leaves and the crackle of branches.

“Up there!” El’s head swung sharply upwards; he jumped - but not fast enough. The crack of bone, then Rheese’s large paws hit the dirt. In his father’s jaws was a limp blackbird.

“Well spotted,” the older wolf said, voice muffled by feathers. From behind El, someone huffed.

“C’mon, Rheese, it’s not like the boy caught the damn thing,” Jay said. The grey-pelted Hunter had been Rheese’s mentor; four seasons older than El’s father, he was harder to please. “You praise them when they don’t do shit, they end up soft. That’s why Hales is always hungry - we don’t have good Hunters.”

“We’re not expecting them to catch anything. Today’s just supposed to be a demonstration, Jay.”

Jay shouldered past Rheese. “Pah. You’re too light on your kid.” Elysium, tail fluffed up in anxiety, watched as his father stared at the older wolf. He tried not to think about the other juveniles’ gazes, which were probably boring into his back now.

The silver-coated juvenile returned from the hunting demonstration with a conflicted look in his eye - pride from his father’s praise, yet disappointment from Jay’s words. From behind, a pale wolf - Heron - caught up to him.

“You don’t have to take what Jay says to heart, you know,” Heron said. Heron was Ulysseus’s father; though the former was a Healer, he had gone to watch the hunting demonstration with his son. “He’s just...getting old. That’s never a good feeling. Although,” Heron lifted his back leg up to scratch his ear, “have you ever considered not being a hunter?”

“Huh?”

“You’ve got sharp senses. Good sense of smell; good memory, too. You would probably be able to find herbs real easy.”

“Trying to recruit more Healers again?” That was Rheese. “Come on, Heron. There aren’t enough of us Hunters as it is.” His tone was even but Elysium knew that Rheese’s patience had its limits.

“I was just putting forward a suggestion.”

“He wants to be a Hunter. Don’t you, boy?”

Elysium straightened. He had never really thought about wanting to be a Hunter; it seemed just the normal thing to do. Healing, on the other hand, seemed just that bit more intriguing - but it wasn’t like that was his dream job, either.

“I wouldn’t mind,” he said, finally; an echo of his mother in the way he measured his replies - not lying yet somehow telling the other wolf exactly what they wanted to hear.

“That’s my boy,” Rheese said and smiled as he beckoned Elysium away from Heron. It was the smile he wore when he thought he had proven a point.

-

Becoming a Hunter wasn’t so much a ceremony as it was a part of life. After all, it didn’t take any sort of feat to become one.

Elysium and his friends were granted their new positions when they were about a year old, and that marked the end of the hunting demonstrations and lessons that they had been given. Now it was time for them to prove themselves during the real thing.

They started off easy; going off in small teams to hunt smaller game, but once the older Halean hunters were assured of the younger wolves’ skill, it was time for them to use it all in a full-fledged pack-wide hunt.

Elysium saw them first - a small herd of caribou in the dense woods headed towards the small Halean meadow that was the only pasture upon which grazers could feed.

“There,” he mouthed, using his tail to tap the shoulder of the wolf beside him, and soon the message made its way towards Rheese - who was one of the leaders of the hunting party. He signaled for four wolves to circle round the rear of the caribou so that they could drive them into an ambush. The rest of them would focus on targeting a member of the herd - Rheese gestured towards an older doe.

El watched as the four wolves made their way towards the back of the herd, flattering his ears in an attempt to stop the blood from roaring in them. He couldn’t. Shaking his head violently, he was jabbed harshly in the ribs by his neighbour, “Don’t blow this for us, man!”

Right. He couldn’t. The pack had to be fed and El was certain that the sound would subside once the hunt was over. The pale wolf tensed his muscle and waited for his father’s signal -

“Go!”

Then, the thunderous sound of dozens of paws hitting the grass. The earth underpaw seemed to shake, and it was all El could do to run, run, run alongside his packmates. Clouds of dust rose from the soil as the caribou began rushing towards them; then, realising their mistake, they tried to turn around. Beside him he could see Theo clinging onto a hoof; Jay, who was on the back of a caribou (El couldn’t tell if it was the same caribou, did it matter if it was the same caribou? He wasn’t sure anymore).

El took a deep breath, tried to find something - but he couldn’t, and the sound of a dozen wolves moving, the herd stampeding - it was too much. He saw a dark shape, barrelled into it - only to realise, as the dust settled, that it was Rheese.

“What the - ” Rheese pushed Elysium off him, coughed, then opened his mouth, about to confront him - only to realise that it was his son. “El? What were you doing?”

“I’m - I’m sorry,” Elysium said. The younger wolf took a step back - anything to distance himself from the shock in Rheese’s gaze that he knew would soon turn into disappointment. “I - I thought you were one of them.”

“Have you ever seen a caribou that size, boy?” Jay spat some blood out of his mouth. “You straight-up messed up is what I’m seeing.”

“I mean...maybe a calf could be that size.” Theo offered, but it wasn’t much consolation, especially not to Jay.

“Leave him alone,” Rheese said, his voice nearly a rumble. He bridged the distance between him and Jay and looked the older wolf in the eye. “He’ll do better next time.”

Jay narrowed his eyes - and stepped away.

“Next time, we might not even end up with anything,” the older wolf said, using his muzzle to gesture to the older doe that Rheese had pointed out earlier. She was small, thin, but at least the pack wouldn’t be going hungry, and that was enough. “Listen, Rheese - whatever your relationship is, whether it’s your father or brother or kid - you know we can’t afford screwups. If the Alphas keep making allowances, we might actually lose someone when winter comes. I’ve seen it happen before you were born.”

“I’m not having this discussion with you now,” Rheese said, but his voice had lost its edge. Instead it sounded tired. For some reason, that was worse to El. Now that his father’s aggression had subsided, every other wolf’s gaze was locked on him - an amalgam of pity and sympathy and disappointment. Some wore expressions of frustration.

“Let’s get cleaned up and get the caribou moving.”

-

It was supposed to be better than a job change. The wolves wouldn’t gossip quite as much if El was transferred to the Lone Hunters - a group of Hunters that set out solo in search of smaller prey like rabbits and birds. It stung, watching the other Hunters leave camp together while throwing him unreadable looks, but he could at least pretend it didn’t bother him when he returned carrying home some measly prey item for his packmates to share.

Why couldn’t he hunt in a group like the rest of them? Elysium’s sleepless nights were plagued by this singular question as he began gnawing on bones like his mother had when he was young. It was a common pastime among Hale’s adults - something to keep their jaws working, to trick their stomachs into pretending that they were eating, when in reality they were uncertain how much longer they’d have to wait for their next meal. Sometimes he would watch pups play in the sunshine, oblivious to hunger, just like he had been. He would wear a look on his face that he was certain was adult condescension.

Come to think of it, his mother had made that face to him, to. But even that was better than the disappointment etched on her muzzle when El had returned from that hunt.

Elysium would spend months dwelling on that, but soon after, there would be someone else to think about.

-

The Stranger arrived without warning, with a deep gash along the side of their shoulder. Two scouts had led them back home, where they were treated by Healers and given time to rest.

The leaders of Hales welcomed the Stranger, for they had not had many visitors to their borders, let alone one who would stay with them - and so when the ghostly-coloured wolf deigned to give the pack their name, the pack grudgingly accepted it. Any wariness was quickly dissipated by the fascinating things the Stranger told them about, though - all sorts of new information on creatures they had only heard stories of. Snakes, for instance, were not found in Halean territory, and stories of them had always stated that they were the size of a wolf. Yet the Stranger claimed that they were no bigger than a wolf’s forepaw.

The pale wolf didn’t just bring insight into creatures, though - they spoke of strange plants that their Healers had never heard of before: the Golden Teardrop, named for the colour and the shape of its leaves; the Dark Dream, named for its ability to make wolves delirious and tired - but the most fascinating among them was the Crimson Night. The Stranger said that they had been looking for it for a very long time, and that it was supposedly a cure-all for every malady a wolf could ever experience.

The Stranger also enjoyed speaking to the Healers on plants they already knew about, though - and suggested new ways to use and store them. El found the Stranger fascinating, and though some more skeptical wolves kept their pups away from their stories, the silver male didn’t have his parents breathing down his neck all the time. He enjoyed discussing things with the Stranger and with the Healers, and absorbed some knowledge through osmosis. For a while that kept his mind off the life of a Lone Hunter, but eventually even the white wolf had to leave.

El was there when they left, and a part of him wished that he had gone with the Stranger. But it was a very small part. The Stranger’s stories had made him realise just how ill-equipped that his entire pack was to deal with the outside world, and much as he was bored and cynical of Halean life, it also had a safety to it.

He had had the same epiphany his mother had.

-

Three borders marked by steep cliffs, a fourth by a raging river - yet even that didn’t make the Halean wolves impervious to danger.

A sickness came on the heels of winter, nipping at their weak: first it was Jay, who had been close to retirement. He had coughed for days, but then began spitting out a green bile that not even their most experienced Healers had seen before.

It was slow-spreading, thankfully, but it still spread - then it was Heron, and then the Alpha’s son. Eventually, the ill wolves were left in camp with the healers and the scent of their own sick, while the rest of them made camp elsewhere. Some of the sick wolves who had been able to fight the illness were able to rejoin their ranks, but the shortage of Hunters and the shifting of wolves to and fro to help with healing, ensure adequate hunting, and to prevent spreading turned to be difficult for even Hales’s leaders to navigate. It was made worse by the fact that the leader’s son refused to get better, instilling in the patriarch a deep sense of worry. The Prince was the heir to the throne, the pack’s future - how would they survive without him leading it?

(In this pack, few wolves had the foresight to think that Hales had barely had a future left.)

The Healers had to stay to treat the sick and the leader’s son, the Scouts had to ensure that they remained protected, and the Hunters had to make sure the pack was fed. Yet there were so many Hunters that the leader of Hales believed that surely he could spare a few.

Elysium and three other wolves - none of which were particularly great hunters - met with the leader of Hales after nearly a season of the pack being afflicted with this mysterious disease. The old wolf claimed he had chosen them for their abilities, though El believed they were chosen because they were the four deadweights among the healthy wolves; four spares who wouldn’t be missed if they were gone. They were to travel north, south, east, and west in search of anything or anyone that could help: the Stranger, a pack who had heard of this illness, the fabled Crimson Night - anything. There was no discussing this, and they would be leaving in two sunrises. That was enough time to say goodbye.

“I’ll be back,” he wanted to promise his parents when he told them the news, but the words faltered in Elysium’s voice as he attempted to say them. There was really no knowing, was there? The pale wolf couldn’t find it in himself to make such a fragile promise, and though the look on Rheese’s face was grim, it seemed as though Lis could parse the meaning hidden behind his sentences.

“Please be safe.” She stepped forward and buried her muzzle into the fur that cascaded down El’s cheek, knowing that it may very well be the last time she could ever do it - not because she had no faith in his survival, but because she knew there was no point in him returning to a place like Hales; even if he didn’t know it now, he’d realise it in time. Lis would have gone with him, but she feared her presence and her own lack of experience would put more pressure on him.

“I will,” he said. Two dawns later, he left. Crossed the raging river with the help of a tree that had met its end at the hands of a ferocious storm, resulting in it uprooting to create a bridge. Unknowingly, it was a storm that heralded a new age - the end of Hales. The beginning of what, who knew?

-

Elysium traveled for months. Life was easier, in some ways - being a decent solo hunter, getting to keep what he killed helped ease the sensation of a half-empty stomach that he had grown accustomed to, though the feeling that he had no one to share his life with ate away at him to a point where he couldn’t find it in himself to eat regularly.

Avoiding danger, however, was another task in its entirety. He could shy away from wolves that were decidedly not the stranger, but he was seeing things that he had only heard of: animals and plants and strange bugs. He nearly got bit by what he thought was a snake once; it was lucky he stepped out of reach in time before pelting off in the opposite direction.

After nearly two months of searching, though, he came to realise that it’d be fruitless without having some eyes and ears to help or at least point him in the correct direction.

(Even if they couldn’t provide that, he’d at least have someone to talk to - the silence threatened to deafen his mind, to render him an echo chamber of his own thoughts).

Then there was Aryn, a pack that seemed … all right, when he first scented them. They didn’t smell sick or bloodied and there was no indication that they would otherwise prove dangerous. Even if they were, well...Elysium would just have to find a way to get out of that situation. For now, the promise of companionship far outweighed the risks.

Group History: to be added

Other: tba