"You're going to be a guardian."
Nanaki looked up from the fascinating grasshopper he'd been valiantly stalking. The little insect sprang away at his sudden movement, and the young pup released a small growl of annoyance at seeing his hunt interrupted. Still, as he looked up to see his father sitting beside him, a giant figure of power and strength and an idol of what he aspired to be, Nanaki decided to forget the insect for this one time. Seto looked so serious as he spoke those words that he didn't understand, so proud, that Nanaki couldn't help but feel like he needed to copy that same attitude.
When next he walked on his small, wobbly legs, Nanaki held his head high and tried to copy his father's strut.
"You're going to protect these people."
Nanaki blinked sleepy eyes, cracking open sticky eyelids only to screw them shut again when the evening light hit his retinas. He felt his mother shift beside him, lie closer so that she was curled around him. Normally such a gesture would have annoyed him, as he liked to think himself too old for such cuddles, but this time he let her, allowing himself to enjoy the contact. She gently slid her front paws under his jaw and he snuggled closer against her neck as she started licking at his wild mane. She whispered those words again, the sentence that he was too sleepy to grasp, ushering it into his ears like a prayer.
He fell asleep to that, assimilating them to his very core.
"You're going to die for the planet."
The world was a blur of pain around him. Blood burned in his one good eye, blood dripped from his jaw, blood flowed from his injuries, from everywhere. His mother walked forward solemnly to take the black feathers that he held clenched possessively in his jaws, and as he grudgingly let go, his eyes would not leave the imposing figure of his father. His mind was scattered, wild from the test that had been set before him and from his costly victory, but he stared, unblinking, into those black pools that were Seto's eyes. And then, in his haze of pain and exhaustion, he thought he heard the Planet thank him even as it cried in endless suffering.
"One day, you will forgive your father."
The Gi tribe had attacked. They had fought, and now Nanaki stood beside his dying mother, a broken spirit crying over a broken body, wails of pain and grief drifting on the wind for the sacrifice of a whole race.
He rested his head under her neck then, as he hadn't done since he'd become a warrior. She purred deeply, licking his mane, and Nanaki knew that the warm liquid running down his neck was her own blood.
When he asked her why and how, she nipped his ear, told him that it wasn't important, only that he would, and with a last breath she returned to the embrace of what she had died protecting.
He howled to the moon that night, and there was no blood relative to share his grief.