Author: innbetween

I am not immune to Valentine’s Day.

Don’t forget, $20/month patrons get to suggest prompts, so if there’s a story you think needs to be told, you know what to do!

In the meantime…let’s get a little lovey-dovey. Here’s a story about Betty’s family.

*

Takhal listened to her friends argue with boredom.

“Humans are always trouble,” Agarkha said, swatting Gharath on the shoulder. “We can’t just waltz into a village and expect them to help us.”

“We have the gold!” Gharath returned. “The humans will help us for gold, they always do. My father—”

“I don’t need to hear the story about how your father has so many human friends,” Agarkha scoffed. “If you want to see the humans so badly, why don’t you go?”

So I was sitting there, wondering what I should write, and a phrase occurred to me that I couldn’t get out of my head: teenage Tode. And you thought middle school was bad for you! Try being raised by wolves! Try being a long-lived race with a decades-long childhood!

Enjoy this little coming-of-age story featuring teenage Tode.

*

Tode sat on a log in a clearing, thinking. He had a question he’d never had before: what kind of animal was he?

He had left the wolves. It was scary, and he was scared, but it was the sort of fear the wolves never seemed to feel, the fear of things that hadn’t happened yet but could. Tode had stopped trying to talk about this kind of fear with the wolves. They said he was a fool to borrow trouble, that they had enough to keep them busy without wasting time thinking such things.

They also told him that he was getting too old to do more playing than hunting, and they might have a point, because Tode still felt like a cub in some ways, even though the wolves who had found him were dead, and their children were too. The pack had less and less obligation to him as time went on. Tode could not blame them. He knew he was not a wolf.