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**Stay away! It has all gone wrong. I would not collect bright pebbles or discs of hard water. I would make more of me by making less of you. I would take your name, your self. It is worse than darkness. I cannot be chieftess. I can't feel the tribe, only this <i>self</i>. This self is a bad thing.**
— Lynn Abbey's “The Good Summer”, from “Against the Wind”, the fourth volume of the Elfquest prose anthology series “Blood of Ten Chiefs”.
Not canonical, but I wish it were. It expands plausibly on ideas the original graphic novels introduced: only mostly alien minds groping in confusion for the orphaned mystery they are — with pebbles and feathers, trophies, possessions. “The Good Summer” is all about that new breed of elfin wolflings’ need for something more — “_They_ don’t need a purpose - just hunt, sleep, eat, and frolic”, says Talen, a full elf, but he’s wrong. Eventually, the elf in them will feel the emptiness and seek to fill it:
“It's mine,” Cat reiterated as her fingers unfolded.
Perhaps the pebble had sparkled in the daylight. It was just a dark lump now. Cat shuddered slightly when she looked at it and cast it far away before Zarhan could ask to hold it.
“It was pretty,” she whisphered, sounding like a cub again, looking to her elfin father for wisdom and assurance. "It was like nothing else I'd ever seen. I wanted to keep it and give it a name of its own."
This is not a show of _human_ vanity or greed; it’s the wolflings struggling with their own dual natures. Now that everyone’s safe and warm and fed, their elfin souls are making themselves known from farther up the hierarchy of needs.
Soulnames, too, are “of the elf”. Why, then, do only wolfriders have soulnames? What is it that sets them apart from the other tribes? Their wolfblood, of course. Wolfblood protects elves stranded in a magic-drained world, makes them part of it — but for a price.
Every “full” elf knows who they are: “Tim-main”, for example. “Sef-ra”, “Ta-len”, “Lee-tah”. As Wolfriders, they might never have found their elfin full names within them… they might have been named, by others or by choice, for their looks, for a skill, for a personality trait: for what they are on and to the World of Two Moons. “Cutter”, “Rainsong”, “Moonshade”, “Skywise”.
In Rahnee’s time, then, the wolflings begin to recover their broken elf-names — precious, un-understood links to their own star-born elfin natures. “Tim”, “Sef”, “Tal”, “Leet”, perhaps, had these four been Wolfriders.
“Mar,” Willowgreen repeated. The look she threw toward Zarhan was deadly with contempt. “She has found Mar… or Mar has found her.”
“Mar_a_,” Zarhan corrected.
“No, Mar.” The healer got to her feet and made a show of cleaning her hands. “Cat was a hunter. She was everything she needed to be, then she went looking for more. Now what is she? Half an elf? Why couldn’t you leave well enough alone, Fastfire? Don’t the flaws in your glass tell you anything?”
I don’t like all of the Blood of Ten Chiefs stories — but there’s some gripping stuff to be found among them, heady stuff, idea-stuff. The Rahnee stories, in particular, give Elfquest a forlorn sorrowful or gritty edge that I have started to miss in the comics.
Another concept given an extra dash of wolfiness in these stories is that of wolfsong. It’s not yet a storytelling ritual there and then, it’s not howling with the wolf-friends and commemorating past chiefs — it's a semi-conscious autopiloty state of mind, soothing, a way to numb hunger and pain, a place to which the full elves can’t escape.
**Open it now. It’s now-time for winter-coming. Now-time for leaving.** The chieftess resisted wolfsong, but every day thoughts had fewer words and more images.
“Not yet.”
**Now.** She butted her spear into the baked mud. The mound collapsed.
Zarhan said something he hoped she’d neither hear nor understand. He retrieved a skull-sized lump from the wreckage. A hollow turquoise ball emerged from the casting. He placed it gently in his lifemate's hands.
“It’s a bowl, a basket for water. You can drink from it.”
She gave him a sidelong glance but raised the object to her lips.
“You have to fill it first,” he explained, taking it from her. Wolfsong inhibited imagination.