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Myrr back to the Ring, where he would be cared for properly.
    The two Watch wolves brought him directly into the gadderheal at the Ring, to the Fengo himself. Finbar had looked at him kindly and called him “a bit of a miracle,” using the Old Wolf term for small miracle, myrr glosch . Somehow it had stuck — the best part. Myrr for miracle. The pup had had a name once upon a time. A name his parents had given him, but now it seemed as dim and distant as his parents. It was as if it, too, had walked away from him on that day.
    Everyone had been so nice to him at the Ring, especially Edme when Faolan had gone off with his sisters. But where was everyone now? Stop crying! he ordered himself. He had things to figure out. He had lost track of time. Where were the others? What had happened outside?
    Cautiously, he crept from his hole. The entire northern and eastern side of the Ring was covered with the glacier. But the other half of the Ring was charred and buried under burnt rubble. It was as if the Ring had been sliced into two, with half of it black and the other halfgleaming white. He took another two steps carefully forward.
    In the short time Myrr had been in the Ring, it had become familiar territory to him. There had never been a pup at the Ring in all its history, and he was quickly adopted by everyone from the gruffest old Rogue collier owls with their beaks blackened from diving for coals to the taigas who instructed the new gnaw wolves. They all loved him, fussed over him as he made his rounds on starry evenings to watch the dazzling eruptions of the volcanoes. He almost had wished he had been born a malcadh , so that he could have competed to become a Watch wolf. The wolves’ terrible deformities did not bother him in the least; in his eyes, each one was perfect. But now as he crept a bit farther out from his hole, he wondered if there was a single friend left alive. And please, Lupus , he prayed silently, if there is just one, let it be Edme. He had never met a sweeter wolf.
    Myrr tried to walk, but the ground was so uneven that all he could do was stumble through the wreckage of the Ring. There were chunks of ice and overturned boulders, boulders that had once served as meeting places for the daily business of the Ring. And everywhere there were bones, bones that had tumbled and scattered fromthe cairns where the wolves stood their watches. The gadderheal , where the court of the Watch wolves met, was now sealed beneath a pond of burbling lava. But where was the colliers’ perch, where owls often waited outside the gadderheal to speak with the Fengo? Where was the bone pit where fresh bones were kept until ready for carving? Where was the taigas’ lodge where the new gnaw wolves came for their lessons? Where were the grooming beds where the off-duty Watch wolves would gather to pick burrs or cinder flakes from one another’s pelts and exchange stories?
    The landscape had been splintered. Dead wolves and the bodies of singed owls lay everywhere. Was there a living creature? With each step, Myrr feared finding Edme’s body, her head crushed like Colleen, the silver wolf with no ears, or Twistling, the brindled wolf with the funny paw. Her back broken like Snowdon, his strange tongue protruding from his mouth.
    Myrr wasn’t sure what had happened first, the quaking of the earth or the onslaught of the glacier that had come charging down upon the Ring, its edge bright and glaring and sharp as an owl’s talons. And now the Ring was crushed. Everything that had been there yesterday was wrecked today — shattered, cracked, and crumbling. Theonly defining features were the upended remnants of the caves and dens that served as lodges or gathering spots for the wolves and owls. The bones the wolves had carved, the tools the owls used in their forges, stuck out from the ground like the skeletal remains of lives long gone.
    The worst places were the ones where lava spills had seeped