The stone hadn't been worth stealing. Ealhild wrinkled her muzzle at it. Its jagged edges flipped paw-over-paw, each dexterous toss bringing the shimmering bauble closer to the wet mud of the swollen river's banks. With each flip, its shine captivated her less and less, its colors dulled before her eyes. Her satchel, open at her side, spilled forth numerous, similar gems, claws and shells that had similarly failed to hold her interest. She couldn't tell you which lions she had taken them from, and it hardly seemed to matter at this point. Capturing trinkets just seemed much less important than it had once been to her.
It wasn't the only thing. Going to see her family had lost its luster; she was happy for them, and the myriad ways they seemed to be growing, but they couldn't understand how she felt. Fighting held no draw, not that she had tried recently. The gangs of her storm-sisters, all prowling the borders and spoiling for battle, made her cringe. A wry smirk warred suddenly with the mild disgust. That was all assuming she even knew how to duel proper anymore - her last fight had been against Gudina, rogue and green, and even then she hadn't exactly squashed him.
Even the rogue-born had been busy as of late. Eal was happy for him - she had seen him with no less than a priestess, and couldn't help but be proud and impressed with how quickly he'd caught on to things around here - but she couldn't deny how much she missed his company. No way around it: the lioness sitting along the riverbank was lonely, enormously so, and it didn't seem like any amount of paltry baubles was going to change that.
In Good Faith