The snow fell. Quiet. Soft. Smothering what had happened.
Or, at least, it was trying to.

Soft white flakes drifted to the ground, attempting to blanket over the evidence. What lay behind. But even that gentle white could not blot out the death that stained these frigid grounds. Instead it was consumed, stained, absorbed into the wicked reds that pooled beneath the evergreens. That trailed beyond it, on tiny paw prints, toward the ever-distant sound of festivities. Of life. Of what his fragile little mind could only assume was family.

And so he plodded along, each step heavier than the last. 
Each breath becoming just a bit shorter. Each muscle wobbling just a bit more.

The two month old could not even begin to process what had happened. Only that he had to move. "RUN!" Her voice echoed, cracked, cried in the back of his mind. Just behind his ears. Itching against his neck. Only that word... she'd only said that word. It didn't sound like anything else he'd ever heard from her before... None of the gentle cooing, the sweet and warming lullabies, her soft voice against his forehead as she told him each and every night how much she loved him. No. None of that.

Choke.
Gasp.

The weight in his throat grew, the horrible heat in his cheeks and his eyes and his throat, it scratched and scratched but it would not stop. The anguish of emotions his young mind could not process simply smothered his consciousness. The pup choked a sob here or there, but otherwise was a mere mass in the forest, shuddering and shaking in the deafening silence that came with a night's snowfall.

His pace, if one could even call it that as the blob of fur moved a mile a minute, creaked to a near standstill. Speckles of white powder began to accumulate on his back, lasting only a split second before it seemed to transform into a brilliant red. The same red that was fresh upon his face, upon his nape, against his belly. Still warm. Still her. Some unyielding part of his mind told him to keep it, to keep her, to never let this stain of love wash off. But he could not listen to his mind right now. He could only hear one thing, everything else was a numbing blur, a ringing that closed in around him.

"RUN!" she had said.
She had screamed.
Begged...

The chill of the night was beginning to steal the warmth from the red that painted him. It began to cake and crust, to send harsher chills up his legs. Plump puppy paws continued against the cold ground, each step leaving an imprint of blood where he went. Of her. She is still with me, this way, isn't she? He could not truly know what it meant to be gone. At two months, what could he know? 

"RUN!" 
A word he knew. And so he had run.
He ran until his legs wobbled. 
Until tears could no longer build in his eyes.
Until his heaving little chest could not take in enough air.
Until the merciless chill of the night pricked at him so relentlessly, he could do nothing but slow.

And now he had stopped.

Shivering violently, the little fat boy sat, hunched. Caked in blood. Caressed in snow that could not keep its white. He could not look ahead, nor behind him. He simply closed his eyes, perhaps hoping that the gentle darkness of the night might claim him. Perhaps hoping that the stunning, beautiful figure of his mother - clad in white and black - would follow the trail of her red and find him. To cuddle him against her belly, under her tail, and coo sweet nothings into his ear as he lulled into enticing bliss. But he could not hope, not now. Just as much as he could not know what this red meant, what death was, or how permanent his loneliness was now bound to be.

All he could do now was sit.
Choke. Gasp.
Sit and shudder under the grasp of an empty night.

"M-m-m-mama..."
But Mama would not answer him.
Not ever again.

The call of the wild no longer gripped her heart to return; home was here, now, as long as they would take her, as long as the skulls she now passed by would stand guard.

She'd heard the stories, the theories, of the young King's murder. She could only imagine the blood that would've congealed through the boy's fur, slick against the grass and dirt, but there was no snow to wash away the color of rust that time ... not unlike -

"What the hell!"

Her heart leapt to her throat at the sight of a larger male by the side of something small and quivering and so very red - at first she couldn't be sure if it was a hunter coming back from a successful trip - but it was the unmistakeable size and scrawniness of a pup that bade Rook to rush towards Jericho, all sense and hesitation thrown to the wind of who this could be, whether friend or foe.

"What happened! He's ... he's covered in blood! Is this your kid? Did you do this?!"