The zeta walked along the river, breathing hard. She’d just run several laps up and down a length of it, to keep her mind off the passing of her family. She was keeping in mind that it seemed rather high lately, like it was going to overflow. She tugged belatedly at a patch of weeds that were growing along the river’s bank.
Sometimes, she couldn’t get over that Vader, Grandmother, and Mother were really dead. All of them, her uncle and grandmother especially, seemed so invincible, like they could never be brought down. She remembered her mother taking a life in war; she remembered helping her do it. The raven. One of the girls who’d killed her uncle. And then a beta of Tarben, Pontchartrai, mated to the king’s daughter Skadi, had literally torn her apart-Rue couldn’t even look at her corpse for fear of a mental breakdown. She was quite sure a limb had been missing.
She had heard rumors that a Hawthorne woman had gone missing. A star-pelted thing, full of quite beauty. She wondered if these were true, and if so, why she was missing. Wolves just didn’t go missing every day. She wondered why she was one of the such few occurrences? She couldn’t possibly be a traitor.
Rue was unaware of the water rising. She was stuck very deeply in her thoughts.

“Maybe you think that you can hide, I can smell your scent for miles”