Ditaren

The chilled air of fall didn't bother Ditaren one bit. His steel gray coat was thick and plush, and made for the biting cold winter that would be on them in a month or two. Only his ears and paws broke the monotonous color of his pelt, being that those areas were pitch black. Even his eyes, cunning and feral in appearance, were a ghostly gray color. "Stupid two-legger..." The wolfdog was mumbling under his breath as he walked along the edge of the marsh, leaving large paw prints sunken into the boggy earth. "No common sense." Ditaren gave his head a shake and stopped to look out over the water of the marsh, systematically scanning along the shore for the familiar, bumpy back of his friend Galar.

Isabel

There was fire in our eyes,
There was blood in the skies.
We walked along the riverside
As we watched the stars collide.
I swear I heard my daddy sigh,
I swear I heard my mama cry.
'Cause we left the dead behind
And the fallen children were on their mind.
It was all we could think of;
It's all that we loved.
But we couldn't turn back.
We stayed on track.
For we marched under the red blood moon
That proclaimed the end was soon.

They were on the verge of war. Isabel could feel it; feel the tension, feel the bloodlust, feel the armies on the edge. She had already lost both her father and her mother. She didn't want to lose anybody else. She didn't want war. But it must happen. The world was fueled by blood and tears. It made the grass grow, it made the wind blow. Everything around them was forged by war. Everything around them demanded war. If there was fate for anybody, that fate would be death. What better way to die than dying for what you believe in? What was more honorable than that?
Isabel had been raised around war. She was fed by war, she breathed war, and she dreamed war. It was her destiny to fight until the end of her life. To avenge Tahti and Windsong. They died outside of war; they were murdered. Their murders were dead, but nobody was happy with that. Blood was everything, and if that blood wasn't completely shed onto the hungry earth, nothing was vindicated. If one must die for such a crime, all who shared the criminal's blood must also die. This was Isabel's mission, and it didn't matter what her alpha thought. She did not share Isabel's blood, so she had no say in the avengement of Isabel's blood.

It was all so much the think about. The white coywolf needed to escape from the emotions she felt. She needed time to weigh thoughts. What better place to think than a place nobody came to for fear of the gator? She carefully walked through the mud that stained her paws brown. She was about to sit down when she heard a voice coming from the other side of the reeds. Normally that wouldn't really interest her at this time, but what the voice said caught her attention. She moved through the cattails to see an unfamiliar face. "I don't usually share my thoughts with strangers the first time I see them, but I can say that I agree with what you have said." Her face was blank, her tone flat. She seemed to suppress her emotions. "The humans know nothing. Nothing useful, at least."

Ditaren

Ditaren watched a lethargic turtle slowly trek across a swath of grass and head towards the water, with movements that were painfully slow because of the cold. The hybrid stopped long enough to watch the reptile, curiously analyzing a faint scar across the creature's black shell, and wondering if this was one of the many that had been in the care of the late Lady. His thoughts were disturbed by the soft fall of paws nearby and his head whipped up just in time to see some cattails rustle and a stranger emerge from them. Large as he was, Ditaren calmly held his ground and studied Isabel with curious, gray eyes, "Most of them, at least." He agreed as he dipped his steel-colored muzzle briefly in a nod. "...I don't believe I've met you before?" Ditaren had met many of the valley's residence before, or at least heard of them from his mother, Starlit Eyes, but this was a new face to him.