Si Daeng

Sip Saam

"Focus...focus...remember, your eyes must look within yourself, not out...", P'Saksit's careful patience, soothing pommade to Red's frustrations as echoes of impotent, stifled rage ricocheted about the cave walls in their latest episode of attempted lynx - or lion - taming.

Progress thus far had been patchy...

"Kanawut, in order to control your shifting, you must confront your second nature face on. Converse with it, understand it. Or, you. Put simply, you're the only one who can..."

Words that seemed to flurry - masochistic moth of disquiet fluttering headfirst into the burn of a blinding lightbulb, over and again - somewhere within Red as he tidied away equipment to depart. Readying to return to the plateau below, where Sil and his closest pack allies waited, silhouettes of three wolves framed against swirling, Impressionists' backdrop of a rising sun.

//

Jet and Jai were those allies. Twins who had grown as if Sil was their triplet - even if elevated apart on a pedastal from birth by the prophecy - reared communally, humbly, by P'Saksit, a trio of beloved wet nurses, and small circle of trusted elders in the pack.

Cubs orphaned by eagles, one way or another...

"Shia. He's really something, isn't he?", Jet had nudged aside to Sil. The first leaning awkwardly - as if finding clothes somewhat suffocating, unaccustomed to human form and its constraints - upon encountering Red in the caves for the first time, weeks earlier.

"You change around him, Sil. You're softer. But then damn steelier to everyone and everything else" - twin sister Jai commandeering the teasing - "I get it though. Hoy! He makes me shy..."

"I can't tell if he wants to shake my hand or slit my throat or both. Protect me sis!", her brother ribbing back.

Both shifters imposing figures of powerful muscle, yet characters as horizontally relaxed as their bodies were vertically towering.

And between the cushions of their familiar laughter, Sil had found himself, once again, thumbing the worn, folded piece of notepad paper, transferred from pocket to pocket in every pair of trousers he wore, since the day he had fired up his motorbike in the sheds at the Northen tip of the woods, and roared to the city in search of some very particular, peculiar advice.

Two days beyond the moment he had first laid eyes on those raggedy, tufted ears of Red's in the throne room waterfall, prize of scrawled handwriting of the bewildered vet he'd accosted to thrust gold into fist as she locked up her surgery for the evening, outlining:

''Alpha cats'. They are natural leaders; they refuse to be led and attempt to take charge of practically every situation. These cats like their food when they want it and the way that they like it - or else. They may only let you touch them for short periods of time and then again, only on their terms. They rebel when admonished and demand attention - when the mood so takes them. You don't own an alpha cat - he owns you, or at least, he thinks he does'.

Because Red was the alpha to his alpha.

//

Forwarding to present - Red reunited with Sil on the plateau, seated side by side on cliff's edge, feet dangling out over gaping precipice...

Silence reigning for some minutes, three parting wolves - P'Saksit, Jet and Jai, soon but ants as they neared the foot of the majestic mount, solar warmth stealing across the valley below as night's mists dissipated, forest yawning and stretching awake to a new Sunday.