Gold

Gold killing an intruder from the recently formed Rosebud Pack.

## About Gold

### General

Gold is from Luna's first litter with Fenrir. He's the eldest pup of the litter, which also makes him Luna's eldest child in general. After a horrible fire that permanently scarred the lands of Amethyst Mountain, he was Fenrir's only living descendant - or so he thought. The forests, ferns and grasses weren't the only ones scarred for all eternity, as he also suffered horrible burns all over his body.

Gold found his mate, Meteorite, at 3 years old instead of 2, meaning it took him over a year to physically, mentally and emotionally recover from the Burning. She pulled him out of a seemingly bottomless pit he dug for himself to bury his emotions deep down under. Believing he was Fenrir's only remaining descendant, he decided to be the heir to the Moon Pack's legacy. The pair traveled back to Gold's homeland - Slough Creek - to have their first litter of pups at age 4.

### Strength

Gold had grown strong after fighting the whispers of Jupiter and Saturn's souls, physically and mentally. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't keep up with his newfound strength for longer periods of time.

## Appearance

Gold is a multi-coloured wolf with burn scars as everlasting echoes of his past. The top part of his face, ears, scruff, back, and tail are a very monotonous dark gray shade, while his muzzle, jaw, legs and underbelly are a pearly white colour. He has slightly brown hints around his shoulder fur. The tip of his tail is black. The bottom part of his scruff is a peculiar light gray shade. His ears are torn up from the many battles he has thrown himself into. His eyes are a captivating golden colour.

## Personality

As a pup, Gold would usually act very quiet, sophisticated and analytical, but if provoked, his true colours would shine, and he would prove to be very bold, brave, energetic, and sometimes fierce. He wished to see the pack fluorish and prosper even more than his sister, Galaxy.

After the events of the Burning, Gold hit the absolute worst point of his life. He was constantly in agonizing pain in multiple different ways, causing him to slowly build up his rage and disappointment at the world until he would unleash it on someone that didn't deserve it. He became very vengeful and protective of Meteorite, going so far as tracking down the cougar that had been harassing her for months, biting it on the back of its skull, bashing its head into a tree stump, and killing it in cold blood. For some time, he was an empty, emotionless husk, and truly felt like he should've died in the fire instead of Luna, Jupiter and Saturn.

## Litters

### First Litter - Age 4

Gold and Meteorite's first litter had three females and one runt male.

Primrose was a slightly gold-tinted tri-coloured female. She was partially golden brown, and also somewhat light gray and white. She was very loud, boisterous, social, and daring. She stuck out lots because of that. Often, she would wander off and get lost. Sometimes it would be on accident, and sometimes on purpose. She would cause trouble and problems left and right, simply because she enjoyed the attention. She was just like her mother Meteorite.

Moon was a bluish silver-and-white female, named after the pack name itself. Truthfully, her parents simply thought that Moon was a nice-sounding name for one so elegant, but she took it to heart. She believed she was destined to lead the pack one day, constantly pushing herself in front of her sisters in order to be on top. She was highly competitive and tried to do everything as well as she possibly could - just because she felt like it. However, this would more often than not lead to disaster when Primrose and Karma attempted to retaliate for the sake of keeping their dignity.

Karma was also a silver-and white dame. She tended to act very analytical and sophisticated, much like her father was when he was young, except she was horribly cocky and sassy about everything. She would attempt to trick others into submitting to her without actually putting in the work needed to be as great as she claimed to be. Another pup that really took after their mother.

Cloud was a small, timid runt male. His coat was just like his father's - dark gray with some white spots. Suprisingly, Cloud was completely different from his sisters. He was a very careful listener, and although he was sometimes too cautious to speak, he was also very empathetic. He was clever, and although he didn't admit it, quite a trooper. Despite being physically smaller and slightly weaker than his sisters, he was a lot more serious and took things to heart. Gold made sure Cloud would grow up feeling accepted - and that he would *stay* that way.

### Second Litter - Age 7

Gold and Meteorite decided to have a second litter the same year the wolves of their first litter were preparing to have pups of their own - including their heir Cloud. Their second litter had two females and two males.

Crystal was a deep-brown coated, bulky female. She was highly playful and was obsessed with pretending to hunt sticks, or gathering bones that she would dig up. She was social, but poorly mannered. She also didn't really know when to stop - she would constantly bite and sneak-attack her unsuspecting siblings for fun, even if it wasn't at all fun for them.

Asteroid *(not to be confused with Cloud's mate, Astrid)* was a murky light brown female. She was very chilled out and laid back, usually just observing everything from the shadows. She was very sneaky, and also rather secretive. You'd never know what she was plotting until it was too late - she was shockingly clever, and valued her dignity a lot.

Black was a tough, pushy, very dark gray male. He was oddly muscular and fit for a pup so small - always full of energy and wishing to run around and chase after everything that moved. He proved to be a very dominant and perseverent wolf and he worked hard at keeping up his delinquent-esque persona. He grew up to be a fierce and suprisingly intimidating brute.

Destiny was a playful, jokey gray-and-white male. Playfighting was essentially his way of communication, and he was highly energetic and social. He was just like his eldest sister from the first litter, Primrose, in the way that he never stopped causing problems. He proved to be a true wanderer, always straying away from his actual destination. His attention span was a very short one, and even something like a cool-coloured butterfly could make him forget about what he was doing.

## In-depth biography!

### Early Days

Gold was once so small, so innocent, so curious, and so clueless. He truly was. His early days were spent playing with his littermates and his father, Fenrir, in front of the Saddle Meadows den site. They had a view of the entire First Meadow from there, and the world seemed so scarily vast. He was right about it being scary. One regular sunfall, Gold sat outside the den waiting for Luna and Fenrir to come back from their hunting trip. He was so hungry, his stomach felt like a hole had been cut into it - swirling, pounding, and stabbing. When he heard his mother's call in the distance, something sounded... different. The pitch of her howl was off, and it sounded almost terrifyingly urgent. The sun had begun slowly dimming, and the Moon was rising. Once the sunlight had dissipated completely, only the Moon was left. And so, his mother's uneven footsteps pulled him back from his thoughts. She had broken a bone in her leg, and somehow, even after putting all her energy and strength into the search, she still didn't manage to bring back nearly anything to eat. The only food she managed to obtain was a still bloody chunk of cow elk meat, but the pups still weren't ready to eat solid foods like this. Yet somehow, Gold was in such horrible pain from his state of near starvation that he managed to eat some of the elk meat. Luna soon squeaked in front of the den entrance, and Galaxy, Jupiter and Saturn came out. Their mother went ahead to sit them down and tell them that their father was ... dead. Fenrir had sacrificed himself so Luna could bring back food for everyone, but she couldn't even do that properly. She reassured them and said that all Moon Pack descendants would one day go to the Pack of the Starlit. And being small, tiny pups, they believed her. Hell, Saturn even exclaimed that he wanted to visit the Pack of the Starlit, so Luna said that he would be visited by Starlit – Starlit meaning ‘dead wolves’ - in his dreams.

Soon after the incident, Luna decided to get another mate to help her with raising the pups. She met a stunning red wolf named Red for obvious reasons, and she brought him back to meet the pups. Unsurprisingly, Gold and his other littermates, except for Saturn due to his own personal reasons, instantly loved their adoptive father. He was strong, competent, and perhaps a bit rash and overtly bold, but the pups truly adored him. Time passed by fast, and once they were yearlings, Luna and Red had a litter of their own, and Gold had to take care of them. All was well until one day that Gold heard a yowl in the surrounding darkness. He at once rushed towards the source of the noise, and what he saw scarred him for a long while. A coyote had bitten his younger sister, Opal, on the rear right leg. Blood was spewing everywhere, and thankfully the coyote was too weak to kill her. It was then that Gold remembered the Pack of the Starlit, and now that he was older, he got to think harder about everything. Well, after giving it a lot of thought, he decided to believe that the Pack of the Starlit was nonsensical. This made him value Fenrir’s blood a lot more – if he really was completely gone, at least his bloodline would live on. Right?

### Amethyst Mountain

#### The Burning

Gold and his littermates had officially turned two years old, and their younger half-siblings were now yearlings. They had arrived at Amethyst Mountain, and so did the rest of the Moon Pack some sunfalls later. Everything was perfectly fine – elk herds were climbing back uphill of the valley now that it was late summer, and food was abundant. Gold was thinking of meeting a mate and having pups in these very mountains, and he was genuinely enjoying himself. However, one morning Gold and Galaxy woke up and instantly noticed something was amiss. The more obvious thing was Saturn’s absence. It was also much warmer than usual. Warmer than summer. The wind wasn’t blowing at all, and there weren’t any familiar scents they could sense. However, despite the lack of wind, they could feel a nauseatingly suffocating stench fill the air. They immediately woke Jupiter up and asked if he knew what was going on, and where Saturn was. Groggily, Jupiter told them that Saturn had gone hunting south of their current location. Well, smoke was slowly beginning to appear and lightly clouded everyone’s vision. Realization slowly seeped in that they were experiencing a forest fire. Something they had only ever heard short tales about, and something their parents weren’t educated enough on to be able to tell them about it. A bright light slowly approached them from the distance. It was coming from down south. The exact direction Saturn had gone in. Completely stressed out, Galaxy asked for Jupiter to run and look for Saturn, and Jupiter, being extremely affectionate towards those he was close to – especially his best friend Saturn - didn’t hesitate for a moment. He got up from his already extremely tired and exasperated state and began sprinting like his life depended on it. His life did depend on it. He absolutely had to go get Saturn, or else nobody would ever forgive him. Not even himself. As Gold and Galaxy very impatiently waited for Jupiter to hopefully come back with Saturn, they hurriedly talked about whether they should get up and run at once. *What did they need to do to live? Would they live? But what if their brothers needed them? Would they turn away and let them burn? Or would they risk their own lives in an attempt to save theirs?* Turns out, they didn’t even need to think about what they would or wouldn’t do. Jupiter came back to them limping with burns all over, and he couldn’t breathe properly due to the smoke. Saturn was dead. His body lay collapsed on the carcass of another wolf he had presumably been battling. They were trapped in a ring of fire, and due to exhaustion from fighting, they both started hyperventilating. But they had no oxygen. Just the smoke of that which was already dead. They both suffocated to death, and Jupiter would too if Galaxy and Gold didn’t rush over and help him walk while in complete and utter dismay. *Why couldn’t he have just told them he was leaving? And why did he fight instead of fleeing? Did he seriously not value his life?* The three littermates were physically supporting each other for as long as they could, but Jupiter was in horrible shape at the time, both physically and mentally. As they walked away from the scorching fire that was following them only a couple cougar-lengths behind them, they came across another, separate acre of forest that was also on fire. What was going on? They tried to rush through the enflamed trees, but then they saw something horrifyingly devastating. Their mother, Luna, was barely recognizable beneath the branch of scorching flames that had fallen on her and crushed her spine. Hearing that their brother was dead was one thing, but seeing the burning corpse of their mother was on another level. It was at that moment that Jupiter collapsed without saying a single word and just started howling in agony, emotional and physical. Galaxy attempted to pull him back by the scruff, but her attempts were futile as Jupiter too joined the dancing embers that encapsulated everything, living or dead, that they touched. Three wolves had died because of something as unpreventable and unpredictable as this. At this point, Galaxy and Gold were running on nothing but pure adrenaline. They sprinted as fast as their legs carried them now that they no longer had to support Jupiter. They were, in every literal sense, running for their lives. At one moment, Gold thought he was going to lose Galaxy. A tree had collapsed right in front of Galaxy, and she had fallen to the ground, now breathing in nothing but the ash of what once was. Terrified, she let out her loudest howl to call Gold back over, but when Gold looked back, he saw nothing but the very same fire that had killed two of his brothers, and his mother.  He had already lost most of his will for life in just this short time, so he threw himself into the scalding flames to try and save his sister. His best friend. The sensation of the fire burning his nerves while he was still fully conscious was absolutely excruciating, and he genuinely wouldn’t wish it upon his worst enemy. The feeling of the flames covering every inch of his legs and neck as he helped Galaxy get back up was torturous. And it lasted even after they had gotten out of the fire. Way after. The pain lasted for so long that Gold genuinely believed he was in purgatory. Purgatory for not being able to save Saturn, Luna and Jupiter. At long last, they made it to Lamar Valley. The burn would spread less quickly, and they would get a moment to catch their breath. Soon, they swam through Lamar River, but even the water felt like it would scald them. They crossed the flowing body of water, and just collapsed. They were too exhausted to even think about Red and their half-siblings – they both swiftly faded out of consciousness before they truly registered the hellish pain.

Slowly opening his eyes, Gold realized he was falling. But from where? Feeling oddly saddened, he began to recollect his memories of what had just happened first. *Oh*. As he buried himself in his thoughts, the abyss was growing, and the bottom extending further and further from him. His emotions began pouring into the hole his mental state had dug for itself, dropping ever so slowly. Every couple moments, he would feel droplets of rain lightly hit his body. It stung like needles each time the water grazed him. The fur on his lower body had almost entirely fallen off, and only red marks remained. He began feeling the pain all over again, and in a moment of intensity, he woke up. He wasn’t falling anymore, but it felt like he was. A gut-wrenching feeling of helplessness overcame him, and it all just felt like too much. Soon, Galaxy’s consciousness returned as well. It was raining, and the nauseating stench of all the bodies that had been burnt in the fire had mixed and swirled together with petrichor. The flames had been extinguished by the tears of his fallen packmates, he felt. Now, he began hoping and praying that the Pack of the Starlit was real, so that those who lost their lives at least got to live on spiritually. Galaxy’s first words after reopening her eyes were where were Red and the others? Neither of the survivors knew, but they hoped they were safe. A sense of doubt crossed Gold’s already exhausted mind, but he didn’t utter a word back to Galaxy. The agonizing pain of the second-degree burns was returning, and there was nothing he could do except wail. Wail until the sunlight returned the next morning. Galaxy had also suffered burns, but not as severe as his. However, she was equally, if not more, emotionally scarred. The deaths of three of her beloved pack members they had grown up with, especially their mother's demise, were horrible events that would be remembered for as long as they lived. Galaxy attempted to comfort him, but the shakiness of her voice made it obvious to Gold that she was trying to comfort herself, too.

#### Twelve full moons

A couple of days had passed since the events of the Burning, and things only got worse as the pair slowly weakened even more due to hunger. They were far too weak and tired to successfully take down any kind of larger prey, only surviving off snowshoe hare burrows and scavenging scraps of meat chunks. But that simply wasn't enough. Five sunfalls after the fire, Gold decided he absolutely needed to hunt down a larger meal, as neither he nor Galaxy would make it if he didn't. However, Galaxy, still too shocked and devastated, didn't have the will to help. She kept muttering something about how she needed to find Red and the others, and while Gold was close to falling back into the bottomless void of emotion that he would never be able to escape, he felt he needed to do this. For Galaxy's wellbeing, and to hopefully heal his own scars as well. He booped his best friend’s nose and departed from the Golden Flower Fields.

Gold slowly and hesitantly walked away from the field Galaxy was resting in, keeping her in his peripheral vision. The way she whispered about needing to find the others was haunting in a way. Perhaps the only reason he wasn’t in the same state as her was because he knew of the void in the back of his mind, constantly using it as a bottle for his emotions. As he trotted to a large rock he could climb on to get a better whiff of any close scents, his leg still hurt like hell. The burns covering him had somehow become even more visible and clear than they were before, to competitors, to himself, and to his nerves. He had to be quick, which was understandably very difficult. The hot sunrays no longer bounced off his gray and white fur, they seeped into his already burnt skin, making him relive the events of The Burning whenever he left the shade. Nevertheless, he ignored the discomfort and continued searching for a meal. Suddenly, a mule deer fawn sped out of a patch of grass that survived the fire, surprising Gold quite a lot. A pack of two coyotes tried to hunt it down, but the mother of the fawn had kicked them away with hooves tough as gold. It would be tough, especially now that Jupiter and Saturn, the better hunters, were gone. *Gone...* The words echoed through his head, almost making him forget about the task at hand. *This was no time to release his emotions, Galaxy needed him. She needed this hunt.* Shaking his head, he continued stalking the prey. He needed to sneak up as close as he could, since he couldn’t run too fast or too long. Slowly creeping up to the fawn, he saw an opening once the larger deer looked away. He threw himself onto his prey, quickly dispatching it with a bite to its artery. However, as soon as the mule deer fawn was attacked, the mother turned around to try and protect it the best she could. *Mother...* In the few seconds he lost focus, he got kicked in the jaw. Quickly, the doe realized her fawn wasn’t getting up, and ran away. He messed up at the last moment, but it was of no importance to him. He had already built up some level of pain tolerance. He ate a chunk of meat before howling at Galaxy to come over. *It was all for her at this point. What would he do without her?* And so, he waited to proudly show of his kill. He waited for some time. Then some more. *Where was she?* Even if she was understandably feeling horrible about The Burning, he felt this was unlike her. They had constantly been with one another since they were pups, he knew something was off. Sucking his emotions back up, he decided to call for her again, and then go to sleep. Yet when he fell asleep, he was back in the abyss. The jet-black, bottomless abyss. Slowly, he began feeling an overwhelming sense of regret. Regret, sadness, and rage all swirled together to make this void he was falling through. It stung. He desperately clawed the air and turned as he dropped. He wanted out. Out of this darkness he had compressed into nothing but a void for himself to fall through. It was eating away at the walls of his skull before eventually finding his brain to poison aswell. Panic began surging through his body along with all the other emotions he had ignored for so long, and it hit him like a truck. With a loud gasp, he woke up, terrified. Forgetting the kill, he ran back to the Golden Flower Fields as fast as he could, even with his scorched leg. Galaxy wasn't there at all, and her scent had been overridden by many others. He tried following it desperately again and again, looping in circles many times. *Why didn’t he just go looking for her immediately?* Hours had already passed since he first departed, and he might have already been too late. *Where did she go? Why must his questions always go unanswered? Why did she leave anyway? Was it to Red and the others? Or was he simply too weak for her? She was mad at him for not being able to help those that died, wasn’t she.* More and more questions surged through his head, and this was simply the breaking point for him. He was able to hold it all in for her sake up until now, but she left him all alone, giving him no more reason to try and stay stable. He wailed once more, but now, he didn’t have anyone to be comforted by. Nobody to tell him it was alright, nobody to care. Why would he care either? He began feeling the emotions from that dreadful dream again. Was it even a dream, or just his subconscious? Not like he would ever know. He had completely given up on everything. From this point on, he just laid there, only getting up once every few days to eat and drink. Everything that came over to try and bother him would be dealt with instantly, the same way as that fawn. That hellish, Starlit-damned fawn. If he hadn’t gone so far to try and hunt it, maybe he would have been able to keep up with her tracks. The deaths of his mother and two brothers had already hurt enough, but Galaxy was the one keeping him sane. With her gone, he would no longer keep everything bundled up. Instead, he would unleash his seemingly endless anger at the world around him. (TBA)

## Trivia

* Gold's story is highly inspired by the songs *Devour Me, Colossus* and *Equus --*
	+ ''You fill my lungs
	+ Am I undone?
	+ Where I swallow the light
	+ Drown me in your arms (...)''