~ A Hunting Trip ~

SAPHIRA

The day before had been a solemn one. Samantha's funeral had been carried out in the late evening, and her ashes were released into a nearby meadow. Her essence would forever rest peacefully in the wilderness, and there is no doubt that Artemis would see to it personally that her soul would achieve Elysium. Other than dealing with the loss of yet another hunter, Saphira has found herself to be in relatively good spirits. She still feels sorrow for her fallen sister, but surprisingly, she's discovered that she's handling the grief rather well as she started on her way to meet Lykos this morning. Unfortunately, she has no food for him this time. A bear had located her stash of meat in the secret crop of boulders and left mere scraps behind.

"Lykos!" she calls, squeezing out of the passage into the ravine.

The wolf is lying on his flank in a grassy patch, appearing to be sunning himself with the early morning rays. Upon hearing his new name, Lykos lifts his head and catches sight of her. He merely yawns and stretches out in an almost dramatic manner, like he's incredibly exhausted. Saphira rolls her eyes at this.

"Oh, sure. Like you're so tired. You've done literally nothing for days," she scolds him. "And you can stop pretending like you despise me now."

Her answer is a low grumble.

Saphira sighs and then tries a new tactic. "Are you hungry?"

Now, he sits up and pays attention to her. She shrugs at him with a smirk.

"Well, too bad, because I didn't have anything to bring you today," she says. Lykos flattens his ears in irritation and glares at her for her little trick. Her gaze shifts lower to his leg and notices that he's putting his weight on it with seemingly no issues.

"Is your leg feeling better?"

Lykos demonstrates his answers with a couple of small hops on his forelegs, followed by a quick spin. He seems to be rather pleased with himself in doing this. Saphira nods in approval before she begins to form an idea.

"Well, seeing as how you're feeling better and how I didn't bring you breakfast, what do you say you and I go on a little hunt?" she suggests.

The wolf frowns at her with a tilt of his head.

"What? Did you think I was going to feed you forever?" she says, allowing her tone to be a little bit teasing. She feels strange, joking like this, but she likes the strange feeling nonetheless. Lykos doesn't seem too pleased with her slight change of attitude, so she decides to try to egg him on in the right direction. "Come on, Lykos. Don't tell me that the big strong wolf needs a girl to do his hunting for him."

His yellow orbs widen before narrowing, while his lips curl to reveal his fangs. The expression is different from the snarls he used throw her way. She doesn't know how she can tell, but this is his very wolfish version of a smirk. He's accepting her challenge. He stands up and shakes off his pelt before he suddenly bounds away towards the passage.

"Hey, wait up!" Saphira calls after him, taking off in his footsteps.

She chases him through the passage out of the ravine and up into the woods, where he doesn't even slow down. Instead, he picks up his speed and she finds herself sprinting just to stay on his tail. He's moving incredibly fast, as if his leg was never injured at all. The Hunters of Artemis hold the moon goddess' blessing that enhances their strength, speed, flexibility, and coordination, but that doesn't seem to be helping her as Lykos seems to put on an even higher burst of speed and begins to quickly leave her in his dust.

"Lykos!" Saphira calls again, but all she gets is another wolfish smirk that he casts over his shoulder. Go figure. He went from a serious, untrusting wolf to a typical, prideful boy who refuses to be outdone by a girl. Well, they'll just to wait and see.

Their run through the woods goes on for a few minutes, with Saphira losing sight of Lykos more than a few times and scrambling to get him back into eyeshot. Suddenly, he skids to a halt ahead of her, his ears swiveling forwards and his nose turned upwards to sniff the air. Saphira shifts her pace so that her footfalls grow close to silent as she catches up to him and reaches over her shoulder for her bow. She comes to a halt beside Lykos just as he begins to move forward again, lowering his nose towards the ground.

"What is it?" she asks him. He pays her no mind, continuing in his insistent sniffing until he starts pawing at the ground, scraping up the soft soil. She leans over his shoulder to see that he's discovered the tracks of a large, hoofed animal; a deer. The tracks are recent, as the ferns and pine needles are still pressed deep into the soil.

"Nice find," she remarks.

Lykos gazes ahead, his eyes following the direction of the tracks. He licks his muzzle, like he's already thinking about the bounty that is somewhere ahead of them in the woods. She wonders if perhaps they would split their kill or if he intends on keeping it to himself. Lykos begins to trot, following the trail through the ferns with his head low to the ground. Saphira feels a little useless in following the tracks and searching for signs of animal activity in the environment, when Lykos' nose is a far more powerful tracking tool than her eyesight. Still, she follows closely along.

They follow the tracks for twenty minutes, moving along at a quickened pace. They spook some squirrels and birds up from the undergrowth, but they pay them no mind. Lykos doesn't so much as cast them a glance, staying focused on the trail of the deer. Their persistence and concentration pays off, when they hear a small snort a short distance ahead of them. The sound has them freezing and dropping low to the ground, with Saphira hunched over on one knee and Lykos completely flat down on his stomach. Even with his body against the ground, he still appears as a huge creature, with the ferns just barely concealing him.

Saphira scours the brush, quickly spotting a glimpse of movement in the bushes. A large, brown-furred animal. It's the deer! Slowly and quietly, she reaches over her shoulder for an arrow. A shot to the heart is her goal. She nocks the arrow to her bow and begins to take aim, steadying her breath and letting her thousand years of experience and instinct take over. Just as she's about to loose her arrow, she feels a soft shuffle beside her. Lykos has risen up into a stalk and begins to creep forward.

"Lykos!" Saphira rasps, keeping her voice soft and hushed as to not startle the deer.

But Lykos only flicks an ear in her direction, otherwise ignoring her warning and moving forward in his stalk. He intends on claiming this kill for himself, it seems. Saphira frowns, watching him move onward and lowering her bow. For such a massive wolf, he moves as stealthily as a panther, his large paws making only the softest of noise with each step. She finds herself fascinated by the power and grace in his movement, the way his shoulders flex and the smooth, confident strides of his legs. It's clear that this is something he has done many times over. It'd almost have to be. If he had refused to eat human or demigod for his entire life as a wolf, then he would have had to sustain himself with animal flesh.

He's only fifteen meters from the deer, while Saphira remains a little farther behind, not wanting to disturb him or risk rattling his prey. Lykos then freezes as the deer lifts its head to look around, but it fails to spot either of them, so it lowers its head back into the ferns to continue foraging. That's when the wolf launches his attack.

The power in his hind-legs explodes, propelling him forward almost as fast as an arrow fired from her bow. In a single bound, Lykos clears almost the entire distance and closes the gap with his second spring, his form reducing to nothing more than a black, shadowy blur that slams into the deer with such force that its thrown onto its flank with a heavy thud. The poor beast didn't even have time to squeal or cry an alarm before Lykos has his jaws locking down over its throat. The deer only manages a wheeze, thrashing and kicking for only a moment, but a shift in Lykos' jaws, followed by a crunch, and the deer falls limp.

The whole process had taken mere seconds.

Saphira is in admiration of the perfectly executed kill. He stalked, pounced, and ended the deer's life quickly, minimizing its stress and its pain. It shows that he really finds no pleasure in killing, doing so only because his survival depends on it.

"Well done," she remarks upon approaching him.

She's cautious. While he has retained much of his human-aspects, mentally, he's still a wolf. She's observed how his behavior does seem to greatly reflect that of a true predator, and after spending who knows how long in the company of Lycaon's pack, he may be more than just a little protective of his kills.

Yet, to her surprise, Lykos allows her to approach, even stepping aside and sitting back on his haunches to give an unbarred path to the carcass. Saphira raises a brow at this and glances down to the deer, then back up to him.

"Aren't you going to eat?" she asks.

Lykos grunts and tips his head to the carcass, never breaking eye contact with her. This confuses her. What is he trying to tell her? He seems to sense her confusion and moves around to stand on the other side of the deer. Then, he shifts his eyes first towards the knife on the right of her waist before lifting a paw to graze his claws over the deer's belly and licks the blood from his muzzle. Now, she understands. He's telling her to take a portion of the kill first, and that he'll eat once she's done. Saphira's eyes widen and she shakes her head.

"No. This is your kill. You have every right to keep it for yourself," she says.

Lykos tips his head back, with his eyes rolling up before glaring back at her. He then crouches to push the carcass towards her with his muzzle. Saphira exhales deeply, seeing that he's not going to eat until she takes her cuts.

"Are you sure?" she asks one final time, placing a hand on the hilt of her knife. Lykos dips his head in a nod. Saphira blinks and smiles appreciatively at him as she unsheathes her knife to prepare for the skinning. "Thank you."

She carefully slits through the deer's hide, starting with its rear ankles and carefully slicing the skin just enough to allow her peel it off, revealing the flesh and muscle beneath. She rolls the hide up and places it to side for the moment. It may make a nice bedding or pack later. Then, she studies the corpse, thinking about what she should take. She figures that Lykos would likely desire the fatter portions, so she leaves the hindquarters untouched to work on harvesting the meaty ribs from the animal's torso. The ribs alone would provide the girls back at camp with enough for at least two day's worth of food, since most of the hunters are away with Xenia or Thalia.

Saphira's eyes dart up to Lykos every now and again as she works away at the ribs. He's patiently waiting, resting on his stomach and watching her cut. She wonders if perhaps there's a way she can learn more about him, about where he comes from, who he was before he was turned.

"So, Lykos. Why is it that you are always in wolf form? Do you not have the ability to change into human form?" Saphira asks him.

The wolf tilts his head at her with a furrowed brow. Then he casts his gaze to the ground as if in thought, before glancing back up at her. With some stiff and awkward movements, his shoulders shift in a soft rise, then fall. He's trying to shrug, which is probably difficult to pull off as a wolf, but Saphira understands that he's telling her he doesn't know… what?

"You don't know if you-"

She stops herself. She was about to ask him if he meant that he doesn't know if he has the ability, when another possibility comes into mind. When she had first asked him if he had a name, she had figured out that he had forgotten what it was. Could it be that he has also forgotten how to return to human form?

"You forgot how to change back?" she tries again. This time, he nods. Her heart twists painfully for him. How is that the most… human, of wolves, was so unfortunate that he, out of all them, loses his humanity? He doesn't deserve this, to not have a proper voice of his own.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs softly. "How… how did you forget?"

Lykos heaves a deep sigh through his nostrils and frowns at the ground, possibly thinking how he can communicate this to her. He's been able to get his points across to her so far. Surely, he'll figure something out. Then, he extends a paw and presses it down into the soil. Saphira watches as he flexes his claws while scraping back the earth. He does this a few more times until he has a small hole in the ground in front of him. Then, he brings his paw back to place it on his other foreleg before reaching out to dip the same paw into the hole.

What does that mean? He must see the confusion in her eyes because he does it again, this time with a dip of his head, gesturing to the hole.

"You… fell in a hole and lost your memory on how to change back?" Saphira tries to guess.

Lykos frowns at her and shakes his head. Yeah, she thought that wasn't likely, but it was the best she had. He repeats his action a third time with more urgency and a soft huff, but she still doesn't understand what he's trying to tell her. The wolf rolls his eyes with a low growl, standing up and turning around to pad a few meters away. He begins to pace back and forth, probably mulling over how he can get through to her. Suddenly, he stops and looks at her with an annoyed expression. What did she do this time?

Lykos returns to her, stopping just short of the hole before he does something that surprises her. He throws his head back in a very dramatic manner with a rumbling groan as he flops over on his side and goes still. His eyes are closed and he remains motionless, except for miming his original action of pawing himself and then inserting his paw into the hole. Did he just… act out himself dying?

"You died in a hole?" Saphira questions.

Lykos rolls to sit up and glare at her, as if asking 'seriously?' Well just how is she supposed to know what that means? He died and was buried in a hole? No, that doesn't make sense. If he died, his body would have become shadows and his essence returned to the Pit of Tar-

The Pit. A pit is a hole. He died and went to the Pit. That's what he's telling her! But does that mean he forgot how to transform because he died? Lycaon has been killed numerous times and still retains his ability to transform between man and beast. How did he forget?

"You lost your life before and your essence was returned to Tartarus to reform. I've gotten that, but I don't understand how that made you forget how to transform," Saphira says. Lykos tilts his head and lets out a heavy breath. Maybe she should try for a different topic.

"What about where you're from? Do you remember that?"

Lykos replies with another attempt at an awkward shrug, but he does seem to gain a wistful look in his eyes. Perhaps he remembers some things about his past, but not everything, or even enough to try put all the pieces together. Hmm… usually, being turned by the curse of Lycaon is a… painful process. Most who are turned were turned against their will, their lives ripped away with a single bite. They lose everything that made them who they were as a human or demigod, most of the time because they cannot control the new bloodlust and desire to kill. Obviously, Lykos is the exception, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have suffered from everything else.

What else is there to talk about? There isn't much to tell him about herself that she hasn't already told him. She could tell about recent events amongst the Hunters of Artemis… or something else along those lines. She just hopes that he'd be willing to cooperate with her on this.

"Lykos…" she begins and then hesitates. He regards her with a questioning tilt of his head, and she breathes deeply. She might as well try. "Yesterday, some of my sisters were attacked while on patrol to the west. One of us, Samantha, was killed."

He doesn't seem to understand, so she decides to just say it.

"It was wolves."

His reaction is immediate. Disdain fills his gaze, his ears flatten, and he recoils from her with a snarl. Saphira quickly realizes her mistake and hurries to clarify herself.

"I know it wasn't you!" she declares. Lykos frowns at her, his expression softening though he retains his confusion.

"I know it wasn't you," she repeats with a softer voice. "But I don't know if maybe you know something about the wolves that did. Where they could be hiding, or how many of them are out there… anything."

Lykos' expression shifts to one that resembles fear. His ears are pinned back against his head and his eyes are dropped to the ground. Fear of what? Fear of Lycaon or fear of the Hunters?

"Lykos, you don't have to be afraid of anything. If you know anything that can help us, they'll never know it was you that told me. I can make up something up," she tries to assure him, but he doesn't seem convinced or encouraged in the slightest. "Please, Lykos. Help me end this war."

The wolf lifts his gaze to her with sadness in his eyes… he doesn't think that there will ever be an end to the war, does he? Lykos shakes his head and paws at the carcass, emitting a soft grunt at her. Saphira sighs and finishes with cutting away the last of the deer's ribs. She stashes them away in her pack to take back to the camp later.

"I'm done. Keep the rest for yourself," she mutters, scooting back to let him have his space at the corpse. Lykos noiselessly shuffles over to take his place, settling down and beginning to press his muzzle into the open flesh to rip out chunks of meat. Saphira sits with her back to a tree, watching him eat. Small steps, she silently reminds herself. They may have just deemed each other as friends, but that doesn't mean she can press him for extreme subjects like that.

Hopefully, he'll come around soon. Maybe together, they can put an end to the bloodshed, once and for all.

A/N:

Hello, readers! Just wanted to take a moment to say thank you to everyone for sticking around for the ride. I know it's a bit of a slow pace, but I promise that things will pick up soon.

I'd also like to reply to the reviews as I think it's important for writers to interact with their readers sometimes.

"It's a slow, but interesting development. So Lykos just accepted... Lykos as his name ?

I'll keep reading !

Chouss"

Yeah, I was originally going to do an entire segment of Saphira trying out several different names, with Lykos turning them down until she finally picks the one he likes, but I thought that might have been too cliche of a scene. There is also an in-story reason as to why he's so eager to have a new name, but we'll get to that part soon enough. (:

"The hunters are cold , sworn off the romance and such."

"Actually we don't know how the hunters are really like. They were portrayed like that in the books because they're not close to the main characters in the books. They might behave differently than how Rick wrote them as it was in Percy's POV. Then again, they could be cold-hearted."

You're both correct in a way. The Hunters of Artemis as we know them by Rick's portrayal is that many of the girls have grown to hate or at least distrust men because of horrible experiences prior to joining the Hunt. We know that some will at least give males a chance or even be friendly to them, like how Zoe Nightshade grew to trust Percy, or Thalia even being friends with male demigods. We also had nothing to indicate that they would have been cold-hearted towards each other. Quite the opposite in fact, given how fiercely loyal they are to their lieutenants and to Artemis. We also saw that Artemis truly loves her Hunters given her grief over Zoe's death.

Once again, thank you all so much for hanging around. It means a lot to me.

That's all for now. I wish everybody a fantastic life and hope to see you all again with the next chapter. Goodbye! (:

~ Shadow