Chapter 139: Sleeping Under Stars (By Choice)

They were standing outside, breathing hard, their ears flat and their eyes wide.

Calis was the last one out. He had stayed longer than the others purely out of stubborn pride, but the relief of open sky above his head was so overwhelming he nearly closed his eyes.

"Are you all alright?" Bessier rushed after them, concerned.

Calis cleared his throat. "The structure is impressive. We prefer the outdoors."

Behind him, his wolves were nodding so aggressively their heads looked like they might detach.

One of them muttered, "I would rather sleep in a corrupted beast’s stomach than go back in there."

"It was not that bad," Calis growled, lying through his teeth.

Once his composure returned, Calis’s attention shifted to something he had noticed on the way in.

He walked toward the water channels without announcing his intention, and his wolves followed, visibly relieved to be moving away from the shelter.

It looked very different from a normal stream, and the lining caught his attention.

This was not like the crude path his wolves had cleared back in his clan.

He followed the channel with his eyes, tracing its path back toward the forest. The stepped sections were visible even from here, each one a deliberate drop that kept the water moving despite the flat terrain.

His pack had spent so long without water while this clan was enjoying it in abundance.

Bessier was already leading them away to the farm up ahead.

"Tera also taught us how to farm! Do you know that food can also grow from the ground? I did not know that before she came. She showed us how to put things in the dirt and they come out as food!"

He said this with the genuine wonder of someone for whom this revelation had never stopped being miraculous.

Calis stared at him. "Food from the ground?"

"Yes! I check every morning!"

Calis felt like he was actually going to lose his mind the more the evening dragged on.

Meanwhile, inside the communal shelter, Faelynn was in a completely different state.

She had been escorted deeper into the structure by the females, and she had noted the odd feeling of being enclosed. But she was too exhausted and too hungry to care about the walls. Luth was curled in her lap, already half-asleep, and the females had arranged furs around Faelynn until she was practically buried in softness.

Then the food arrived.

The smoked meat came first, and Faelynn gobbled it all up. Then her mood deflated when the females had told her that there wasn’t enough meat since they were running low on it.

But they had offered her something else.

They handed her a small hard basket filled with mashed tuber mixed with crushed sweet herbs. A warm, earthy smell rose from it, and the surface glistened where the herbs had melted into the soft flesh. One of the females pressed a smooth stick into her hand.

Faelynn stared at it, not understanding what it was meant to be used for.

The females had gladly explained the concept of a spoon to Faelynn and had taught her how to use it.

Faelynn stared at the strange soft food for a long moment before taking a cautious bite.

Her ears shot up.

It tasted so delicious, and the texture was unlike anything she had ever tasted before.

The mashed paste was so soft and soothing that it settled in her stomach with a comfort that felt like she was being wrapped in warm fur from the inside.

Faelynn ate the rest of the tuber with a careful, reverent slowness, as if afraid it would disappear. When it was gone, she was given more. Much to her excitement!

The wolf female ate three more baskets. Luth had woken at some point and had been spoon-fed by her mother.

While she ate, the females talked. They told her about the days of empty stomachs and mud dens, and how everything had changed after the shiftless female arrived. Faelynn listened without speaking, stunned at what Tera had done for them.

Outside, Calis and his wolves had also been offered roasted tubers of their own by a few of the Dow clan members who had taken pity on the shell-shocked wolves.

The wolves accepted them cautiously, sniffing the unfamiliar food before taking experimental bites.

The reactions were predictably dramatic. It didn’t match up to the meat they had eaten in their pack, but this tasted very nice. One wolf even ate his entire portion in three bites and then looked around wildly for more.

Two others were eating while pretending they weren’t enjoying it, their expressions carefully neutral even as their tails betrayed them.

"This is acceptable," one said stiffly, his tail wagging so hard it was kicking up dirt.

The early night settled over the settlement, and the Dow clan members began offering the wolves spots inside the shelters for the night. Each invitation was met with the same polite, rigid refusal.

"We are fine outside. Thank you."

"The air is better out here."

"We prefer to see the sky."

"I will never enter one of those things again."

This had earned a few laughs from the other beasts. But a number of them had actually laid out under the night sky too.

As for Calis, he had secluded himself to the settlement’s edge while his wolves were resting, all of them already dozing as they were a bit tired from the long journey to this clan.

He sat on a raised patch of earth at the very edge of the settlement where the tree line ended, and the plateau began. The tubers he had been handed earlier sat untouched in his hands.

The farm stretched out before him across the flat expanse. Neat rows of green things grew from the soil in organised lines that ran straight toward the distant edge of the plateau. Beyond the farm, the land dropped gently toward the forest, and beyond that, the fading evening light painted the scanty horizon.

It was very quiet out here.

He thought about every single thing he had just seen and discovered. At the centre of all of it was a shiftless female who had created all of this within a year.

That was the part that had shocked him the most.

His own pack had gone years without stable water, and she had solved that problem in a single night.

The comparison was very heavy.

He looked at the tuber in his hand, then took a bite.

It was warm, and soft, and it tasted like something he had no words for.

Calis chewed slowly, not understanding what to feel.

Behind him, the settlement hummed with the comfortable murmur of a clan that knew it was safe.

And as he thought about Tera, he started to wonder what else he had been wrong about.