the Bound
A people who continue by taking.
Half the pack you grow up with was born to it. The other half was brought in. Neither half is spoken of differently.
How they live
The Bound do not think of themselves as scarce, though they are. A pack that cannot hold its numbers does not disappear, it replenishes, and it has always replenished the same way: a child is brought in, the rite is performed, and by the next season nobody in the den remembers there was ever a question about it. This is not concealment. It is simply not a thing that needs saying twice.
Rank inside a pack has little to do with blood and everything to do with use. A runner who can cross three rooftops in the dark earns more than a den elder's patience, taken or not. The Bound raise their young communally, feed each other before themselves in a lean season, and treat the surface war as weather: constant, worth tracking, not worth explaining to a cub who has not asked yet.
They call the humans' word for them exactly that, a human word. The Bound do not use it among themselves, and a pack member who hears it used against them does not flinch, because it has never once described anything true about how they live.
What they hold
- The pack continues, however it must.
- A taken one is raised, not marked.
- The den feeds its young before its elders.
- What the surface calls a raid, we call how we have always continued.
- Nobody who was born to the pack outranks somebody who was brought to it.