POV: Theron
He sees his daughter. And barely recognizes her strength.
The white wolf outside the prison bars.
That's the first thing I see when the King's warden-magic opens the channel, the specific white that has been the marker of the Direwolf bloodline's fullest expression for as long as the bloodline has existed — the last Direwolf alpha's color, the color that was always going to be what she became if the blood ran true and the circumstances permitted the becoming.
I expected a child.
That's the truth I'm sitting with in the specific honest reckoning that centuries of imprisonment enforces when there's nothing else to do but reckon. I planned around a child — the infant I left, the girl I imagined growing up somewhere quiet and safe and invisible to the forces that were going to come looking for Direwolf blood once the prison's existence became known in the right circles. The child I arranged things around protecting by removing myself from the arrangement.
