Spirit Wolf Read Online Free

hindquarters, a prickling as if he had backed into a thorn bush. Even as the earth heaved beneath his feet, he whipped around and blinked. The earth shook his brains and the air was thick with dust, but he had seen anunmistakable bump forming on his rump exactly where a tail would have grown. This cannot be! he thought. But the bump had grown, lengthened, and soon a white tip poked out. “I am growing a tail!” he gasped. “A tail at last!” He knew what this meant. The earthquake had destroyed the ember and the prophecy of the first king Hoole had come true. That which was broken was being mended. The whole world was broken, but he was mended. He had a tail!
    Death and suffering surrounded him, but Heep had never been so happy in his life. He had a tail! In the days after the earthquake, he became mesmerized by it. He practiced constantly flicking it this way and that way. And when no one else was looking, he tried tucking it between his legs in a gesture of submission just for the fun of it. He used his tail to swat his son, which Abban found preferable to being struck by his father’s paw. Heep forced his mate, Aliac, to spend countless hours grooming it. He loved that the tip of his tail was white and not the same color as the rest of his pelt. He felt it made a very striking, more commanding, impression.
    This, of course, was his mistake. Quietly the other outclanners sniggered behind his back. His vanity was eating away at his marrow, they said. And they were right.

    Myrrglosch, a young pup who had been at the Ring for less than half a moon, peeked out from the rubble of the earthquake and blinked. “Oh, Lupus!” he breathed. How can this be happening? Not now, not after all we’ve been through!
    A wind like a wall of cold bore down upon the Ring, stinging his face as he peeked out. Behind it, a great white mountain taller than any volcano crumbled through the smoldering remains of the Ring. Was this what was called a glacier? The H’rathghar glacier! Myrr thought, cowering against the trembling earth. It was like a beast, a huge gnashing beast of bristling ice. A white grizzly! He had heard a skreeleen story about such a beast that appeared to stomp and chew up whatever was in its way. Its leading edge now was so close that it obliterated the sky.
    Myrrglosch opened his jaws to scream but the air filled with a great hissing steam as the ice met the last remains of the volcanoes. It snuffed them out, shoveled them into the screaming earth as easily as a bear trampling through a low bush.
    Myrr grew dizzy at the thought and he collapsed in a faint.
    He was not sure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke, he was sure he was dead.
    Am I a lochin? He licked his paw and he could feel. Or was he teasing himself? He twisted his head around and nipped his own shoulder.
    â€œYouch!” he barked. He’d bitten so hard he’d drawn his own blood.
    â€œGuess I’m alive,” he muttered and began to weep enormous tears. He couldn’t help it. Too much had happened in his short lifetime. First his parents had abandoned him and he wasn’t even a malcadh ! He was a perfectly formed, healthy pup, so plump and perfect his mother had called him “Cutie Pup”! But then something awful had begun to happen. The strange wolf with a mask and helmet had appeared, calling himself the Prophet, and Myrr’s parents had fallen under his spell. They seemed to forget about the clan, then food, then even their own little pup.
    Myrr would never forget that day when he left his parents. He would never forget the bland staring look in his mum’s green eyes when the Prophet had been exposed as false in front of her. She hadn’t even reacted, and when Myrr begged his parents to pay attention, to snap out of the spell, they had walked away from their only pup as ifin a daze. That was when Faolan had picked Myrr up gently by the nape of his neck so he and Edme could take