Chapter 8: Shocking

“What on earth is this?”
The documents, of which I had only been able to see the first three characters of the title before my sister snatched me up at a frightening speed.
As they glittered erratically under the flickering candlelight, my eyes were constantly drawn to them.
Normally, a good child wouldn’t peek at other people’s things, but even the heavens would surely permit me to be a righteous thief just this once.
I am a big, scary, and bad wolf.
I let out a silent ‘kyaang’ roar towards the sky, careful not to let my sister hear, and wiggled my tail as I approached the desk.
Thump, thump, thump.
The long-awaited time for peeking.
“Heehee…”
I feel a sense of transgression from doing something bad behind my sister’s back.
It was a pleasant sense of deviation that made my tail tremble.
Grunting, I climbed onto my sister’s wooden chair, and after completing the arduous ascent, I looked down at the desk.
“Arctic Fo… %&sp… &☆cies…?”
Oops.
I had just realized that I still couldn’t read all the characters of the wolf tribe.
The reason the book in my tail was a picture book instead of a regular book with lots of text stemmed from that.
It’s not something to be proud of, being eight years old, not counting my past life, and still not being able to read, but to make an excuse, it’s because learning to read wasn’t very meaningful in the north.
What’s important is eating and living, not letters.
So, while I knew commonly used words, I didn’t know the ones that weren’t.
It wasn’t just me.
Even the kid next door probably couldn’t write half of our tribe’s characters if you asked them to.
Hmph.
But unlike them, I know how to write my own name.
Because I studied hard with my sister, staying up for several nights!
A cool wolf knows how to write their own name. I picked up the pencil lying on the desk and coolly wrote down my three-character name.
“Lang… Seol…… Ah…!”
Unlike the letters my sister writes, my three-character name was crooked, tilted at a huge angle, soaring to the sky and then plummeting to the ground.
But it was clearly written, the three characters, Lang Seol-ah.
Hehe, my nose stands tall in the sky.
Oh, right, I know how to write my sister’s name too.
I wrote my sister’s name below my own, which was written in large letters.
“Lang…. Seol…… Yeon… yeon? eon?”
I wrote the first two characters by referencing the name I had already written, and now I had to write the last character, but it was incredibly difficult.
I rummaged through my faint memories, scribbled a line through the wrong character, and after a few corrections, I finally managed to write out my sister’s full name!
“Heehee…!”
At this point, my creative desire started to well up.
I drew a small wolf next to my largely written name.
It’s still small, but it’s a cool wolf that will soon become huge.
And next to my sister’s name below it, I drew a super big, cool, and dignified wolf.
This, of course, is a drawing symbolizing my sister.
“Wow…!”
After finishing the drawing, I realized that I had a talent for art.
I’m so scary, a wolf who is strong, powerful, cool, and even talented in academics and the arts!
Excited, I decided to draw my entire family right away.
I’ll write my dad’s and mom’s names below my sister’s name!
“Lang…… but how do you write Dad’s name?”
My dad’s and mom’s names didn’t have two characters in common like our sisters’ names did.
The only thing that was the same was the surname at the beginning, which indicated we were from the same tribe.
Simply put, it wasn’t a name I could just wing.
After pondering for a moment, I concluded that I hadn’t studied enough and decided to just make do for now.
Scribble, scribble, scribble.
The pencil glided effortlessly across the paper.
Curved and straight lines intersected and harmonized, eventually creating a perfect picture of the wolf family.
“Hehe… hwaaam.”
How long had I been drawing?
It seemed that waking up at night was quite a strain on my young body, as my eyes gradually began to close.
My vigorously wagging tail and perked-up ears drooped limply, constantly expressing their fatigue.
Since the drawing was finished, there was no need to force myself to stay awake.
I wrapped my tail around my front and hugged it tightly, feeling my sister’s faint scent lingering on it and the warmth of my own tail, and fell asleep just like that.

“Haaah.”
Seolyeon let out a sigh.
Although she was born a strong wolf beastkin, the fatigue of staying up all night was not easy to get used to.
On top of that, she had exhausted a considerable amount of stamina searching for her sister in the snowfield the previous morning, so it was only natural for fatigue to pile up.
She couldn’t even rest comfortably during the day because after the sun rose today, she had to finish the task of handing over the butchered wyvern meat to the polar bear.
Then perhaps she should just organize the work she had been doing all night and get at least a little bit of sleep.
Seolyeon thought.
“But…”
She couldn’t easily dismiss her sister’s words.
No matter how many strange things her sister did, she had never said anything completely outlandish.
Perhaps through this incident…
“Mmm, no.”
Her father had repeatedly told her that a pack leader should not make hasty, optimistic observations.
The leader of a wolf pack can only rest easy after everything is over.
It’s no different for beastkin.
Walking down the dark hallway, contemplating whether to continue her research, Seolyeon slowly opened the door when she reached her room.
The crackling, warm fire, the flickering candlelight…
“What—”
And her sister, asleep at the desk.
Startled, Seolyeon rushed over.
‘Did she see it? No, of course she did.’
She had been careless.
No matter how soundly her sister had slept at night before, she should have fully considered the possibility that she could wake up.
Seolyeon hastily looked down at Seol-ah and the desk.
“…”
Perhaps it was all for naught.
Seolyeon sighed, looking at the papers covered in messy scribbles.
Since they were copies, it wasn’t a huge problem that her sister had doodled on them.
It just… felt a little empty.
Her heart having momentarily dropped, Seolyeon slapped her forehead and sighed several more times.
Then, she picked up the paper that was under Seol-ah.
“What is written here?”
Seolyeon slowly read the chicken-scratch handwriting.
It was not easy to decipher because it was written so crookedly, but with the strength of an older sister, she managed to read it.
“Lang… Seol-ah.”
‘Is the drawing next to it a picture of herself?’
Seolyeon looked at the drawing closely.
A small wolf drawing.
The way it was all squished was cute.
She didn’t seem to have a talent for drawing, but as long as it was cute, it didn’t matter.
And next to it, something was written in small letters. Seolyeon carefully read it aloud.
“Will grow big soon…?”
It seemed Seol-ah thought she would grow as tall as her sister or the rest of the family.
Seolyeon tried to calm the trembling of her eyelids.
Because the average height of an arctic fox beastkin was…
Well, that’s not what’s important.
Seolyeon moved her eyes.
The next thing written was, presumably, her own name.
The reason for the ‘presumably’ was because the word written there was not Lang Seolyeon, but Lang Seol-eon.
Around that character, several other characters were written and then crossed out with a line, as if she had tried writing all the characters she was confused about.
Ryeon, ryeong, yeong… and yeon.
Why did she erase the correct character even after writing it?
Seolyeon chuckled quietly at the absurd sight.
As she stroked the head of her sister, who was not just hugging but practically buried in her own tail, her sister tossed and turned and mumbled in her sleep.
The next thing written was her parents’ names… no, it was just ‘parents’.
Thankfully, there was no mishap of not being able to identify who they were.
Lang Dad.
Lang Mom.
Seeing the traces of trying to write something to the left of ‘Ah’, it seemed she had originally intended to write her parents’ names.
Judging by the result, it seemed she had failed.
And next to them were wolves representing her father and mother.
Adding the drawing of the younger sister wolf and older sister wolf she had seen earlier, a cute picture of the wolf family was complete.
“Fufu.”
It was a heart-warming picture.
Although the materials she had prepared were so messy they were unusable, it was a picture warm enough to be worth it.
Seolyeon carefully lifted her sister.
Because Seol-ah was so deeply buried in her tail, it was impossible to tell whether she had lifted her sister or her tail, but either way, her sister would have been lifted along with it, so it didn’t matter.
“Sleep well, Seol-ah.”
“Ae-ung…”
The sound of her cute sister’s sleep-talking.
Seolyeon laid her sister on the bed and tucked her in tightly.
The sight of Seol-ah, sleeping soundly while hugging her own tail, was, as she always thought, incredibly lovely.
“I’ll have to show this to Mom and Dad later.”
After that, Seolyeon tidied up the desk.
She set aside the doodled materials for safekeeping, separated the materials she was currently researching from the ones she had finished, tapped the papers on the desk to align them, and then turned back around.
The blanket rising and falling up and down.
And the crackling fire, and the flickering candlelight.
A peaceful sight.
What she had to protect. And what she wanted to protect.
The candle melts and a drop falls onto the saucer below.
“Hoo.”
Seolyeon blew out the candle.
As she thought about preparing drawing paper and colored pencils for her sister.