February

Name: Fin-of-the-Fang More'd ((Finn))
Age (alive/dead): 12/ between 4 and 5
Species: European x Eastern Timber (?)
(She's a medium sized black wolf. Although her biological clock has been set back to give her a younger body, her features are still rather silvered and grizzled, as if with age.)
Sex: Female

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Once upon a time, the stories say, two packlands found themselves at war. One was headed by the most fearsome son of the Auciel dynasty: Fenrin Auciel. The other was commanded by a young More'd who struggled to strengthen her pack after plague decimated the lands. In the stories, Fin-of-the-Fang More'd is always portrayed as a kind, rational leader and Fenrin as a dastardly, violent villain. Storytellers never realzied that if circumstance had been different.... If both packs had not suffered from the cursed plague and post-apocolyptic paranoia....

She should have died years ago and she knew it. Any proper pack would have left the aged, arthritic, once solid ebony, once alphess wolf to go about the business of dying in peace and privacy. But, unlike the one who carried them in her womb, Finn's children were inferior creatures. Never once had she successfully mated with a male truly worthy of her love. In her lifetime, she had only met one male truly worthy of her admiration and he was the root of all...

Like the living dead the grayed female lay sprawled in the sun. Its warmth did not penetrate the cataracts that overtook her amber eyes. Finn could not say how she had managed to escape the ever-hounding eyes of her progeny and grand-progeny and great-grand-progeny. She could not even say which of her idiot spawn styled themself alpha these days. The memroy of a black face flitted across her memory. His features were handsome, but made angry with circumstance.... The Auciel had been a brilliant alpha. How she had mourned the day when he took a mate. How she had wept the night after she day he died, leaving her alone. The last of her generation.

Another face entered her mind's eye. This one was unfamiliar: a pale wolfess bearing a peculiar, birdlike mask over her face. Its beak extended outwards. "Would you like to sleep?" the bird-wolf asked.
"Yes."
"Not yet. Not yet. Sirius will take care of you.... Go. Live some more."
There was a pause as amber eyes closed, ending a life long overdue. And then the odd wolf, still painfully visible in Finn's consciousness, screamed an order the once-alpha could not disobey: "SWIM!"

And then Finn was drowning.

No.

She was swimming. And swimming. And then she felt ground under her feet. And then she felt water dripping from her black and silvered guard hairs.
And her eyes opened.
And she saw with a clarity that she did not recall posessing.
And she inhaled through her nose on the banks of Mirror Lake.