Present Day…

Lying on his back in his bed, arms folded underneath his head, Ash stared up at the ceiling and remembered that day six months ago at the orchard. He couldn’t remember all of it, though the things he couldn’t remember were of no real importance. The alpha named Quincy led him through the orchard, which was brimming with activity. Ash remembered round, sun-kissed fruits, dragging overladen boughs nearly all the way to the soil. He remembered workers here and there in the distance, gathering apples. There were baskets filled with the evidence of their work just lying around, waiting to be carted away.

But, recalling specifics of that walk through the orchard was beyond him. The colors of the apples, the identities of the workers, how long they had walked for, it was all a blur. If it had been cold in the shade of the trees, he didn’t know. Those were the unimportant things.

Quincy led him to the edge of the orchard and stopped there, then pointed him on towards a stretch of untamed forest. “The well is in there,” he had said. “Just keep going straight.”

Going straight proved to be an impossible task due to just the nature of the forest itself, which was lacking in any sort of symmetry or reason. Brush and thorn thickets grew where they pleased, forcing him to go around them or risk coming out the other side naked after the prickers had torn all his clothes off. Once around the obstacles in his way, he tried to resume heading in the right direction, but it was impossible to tell. Everything looked the same, while also looking nothing alike.

It was a blur of green wilderness and shadow in his memories. When he dreamed of the forest in the days afterward, the tree branches were like claws reaching out to snare him and mysterious dark things crouched in the undergrowth, watching. That was all wrong. He didn’t think there had been anything alive at all in those woods. No birds had sang, and no insects had flown into his face.

But perhaps he just didn’t remember that.

But he would never forget the sight of the well. It was one of those things which would still be just as fresh on the day he died as it was right now.

It was cold. Very, very cold. The chill seemed to radiate outwards through the small clearing, originating from the well itself. The high canopy of the surrounding pine forest meant that only a few faint patches of sunlight fell through the branches to dapple the grassy clearing floor. This was grass that had never been cut, never been trimmed or harmed in any way by humans, never been feasted upon by animals, but it wasn’t an overgrown mess. It looked like some giant hand had plucked up a piece of a meadow and set it down here, like a puzzle piece that had been made to fit.

The well itself was a simple thing. Ash could hardly believe that he was here, that it was real, but it most certainly was. If it had been grand, gilded with silver and glowing like a heavenly halo, he would have known that this was all some sort of trick. A publicity stunt. An elaborate hoax. Something.

Instead, it was simple. It was just there. A well, with the customary circular wall of stone and a wooden roof above. The entire thing leaned sideways, and the roof was covered in tangles of draped moss. It looked like a well that had seen better days, and that was all.

But there was power in simplicity. Every artist on the planet knew this to be true, whether or not they understood or obeyed that law. It looked like a forgotten thing, and that was what gave it power. There was just something wrong about it, something that just should not have been.

Almost against his will, he had started forward. The grass was so soft underneath his feet that his steps didn’t make a single sound. The closer he came to the well, the more he saw the signs of age. The black rotted patches on the wood, where moss and moisture seeped in. The cracks on the rock wall.

He had touched it, and the surface was so cold. So, so cold. It was worse than ice, like frozen metal. It took his breath away, stung his skin. He wanted to take his hand off the wall and get the hell away from it, but his fingers were stuck as surely as if they were frozen in place. Only his mind wanted to retreat. The rest of him didn’t, was intoxicated, drunk on the experience.

He looked into the well. His thighs pressed against the cold wall as he did so, and the chill seeped through his pants and somehow also into his heart.

It was like watching an angel put a puzzle together, summoning flecks of color and light from nowhere before assembling them into the right places.

He remembered thinking, quite distinctly, this is my mate, as the vague impression of a strong face was completed. Details emerged. The expanse of a pair of shoulders, the messy silhouette of hair. Everything grew more and more clear as he watched, and then suddenly there was a man looking back at him from the water.

Well, it was less of a man and more of a portrait of a man, as he saw the person only from the chest up. He looked to be around the same age as Ash, though they certainly hadn’t gotten old at the same rate.

He was broad in the shoulders, with a square, handsome face. His hair was once dark brown, and there were still flashes of that true color in his moustache and beard and at the roots on top of his head, but the rest of it had gone the dark gray of wet granite. It was styled messily, tousled with expert care. His beard was mostly stubble, though it looked to be deliberate stubble and not a result of neglect.

His skin had been tan, though creased with wrinkles around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. This didn’t look like a man given to laughing, so the only conclusion Ash could draw was that these lines were the result of stress or a ton of frowning.

It was the eyes that changed his impression of the man looking back at him from the well. Eyes were the window to the soul, so people said, and that phrase was never truer than it was right now. They were soulful and deep, with gray irises. No, not simply gray. Pale, shimmering gray, a shade closer to silver than anything else. They seemed to hold something within them that Ash couldn’t quite identify at first. Only through some extensive, strenuous thought did he realize he’d been mistaken. It was himself that had placed importance on the eyes, and that was because he recognized them.

From when or where, he didn’t know. He just knew that he had seen them before. The rest of the man was unknown to him but those eyes held the key to a lock he didn’t have.

And then the image in the well had changed, the man becoming a wolf. There was nothing truly spectacular about his wolf form, as it was of a very common gray coloration with very little variance except for white age marks here and there on the face. However, Ash felt as if he recognized this, too.

But from where, and why?

He had put his paintbrush to work, crafting the questions in his mind into physical form. He enjoyed a few brief months of creativity as a result, and some of the newspaper reporters came flocking back to him as word reached their ears. They called his sudden rise in production his Intrigue Period, because of the style and quality of the paintings. His works sold like hotcakes. He couldn’t keep up with demand. He was happy, working all day and sleeping deeply at night.

But, there was only so many times a man could examine the same scene. There were only so many angles to look from. There were only so many questions which could be asked without obtaining an answer before a man grew tired of asking. His productivity ebbed, and eventually he was back to struggling for subjects. The newspapers turned to the next hot subject, and he was once again left in the dust, struggling with his next bout of bills and debt. For a time, he stopped caring about the well, stopped wondering about a person he would never meet and an impossible scenario that would never happen.

Then he went into Falcon’s Nest tonight, and the bouncer greeted him with more enthusiasm than usual. That was odd in and of itself, until he was informed that there was someone new in the building.

“What?” Ash had asked. He smiled a little, not sure if this was a joke or not. “You never let anyone new in.”

The bouncer chuckled softly. Ash knew his name was Tom, and that he was a college dropout, but they weren’t exactly friends. Still, it was hard to frequent a place like this without becoming familiar with the workers and the other drinkers. That was especially true when you had a person like Tom manning the front doors.

“You know that’s not true,” Tom said. “I just don’t let most people in. Have to protect the aesthetic, you know.”

Oh, Ash knew. Everyone knew. Tom protected Falcon’s Nest in the same rigorous manner as a backwoods father protected his daughter’s virginity. He was unrelenting, threatening whether he meant to be or not. No women were allowed, ever. It was a gay bar, a gentleman’s bar. Anyone who seemed like they were in search of a party was automatically refused entry, as well. Only well-dressed, composed men were allowed. Those were the rules.

In this day and age, in a regular city like Portsmouth, that greatly lowered the odds of someone being allowed inside. It was almost an invite-only sort of affair. No one just walked into Falcon’s Nest. You had to hear about it from someone else.

If there did happen to be a new person inside, Ash always heard about it from Tom. Then, inevitably, he would seduce the newcomer and sleep with them. It didn’t matter that he was an omega wolf, or that most of the people he slept with were merely human. It was a tradition of sorts, to use his charms, demeanor, and natural submissive behavior to lure the new men into his arms.

They never stayed the night, and that was for the best. He wasn’t exactly in the best position to pursue a relationship. It was all about the release for everyone involved, the influx of relaxing hormones which came afterwards.

Tonight of all nights, his spirits were low. He didn’t much feel like fucking. He wanted to get drunk and lose himself in a buzz, pretending for a few hours that the rest of the world didn’t exist. When that was done, he would head home and churn out about four paintings before falling asleep on the paint-spattered floor. Even inebriated, he still tried to accomplish his goals.

All the same, he asked, “What’s he look like, the new guy?” If he hadn’t asked, Tom might have sensed that something was wrong and asked about it. Ash wasn’t in the mood for meaningless sex, and he sure as hell wasn’t about to be interested in a deep discussion on his emotions.

“Oh, you’ll know him when you see him. He’s at the bar.”

Ash had thanked him, as he always did, and headed inside. As the door shut behind him, he scanned the bar and quickly saw the newcomer bent over a distinctive orange drink.

His heart stopped, stammered in his chest, and then began racing. His thoughts were left far behind, stuttering and stammering at the starting line. That full head of messy gray hair, dark at the roots, was so familiar to him that he could almost feel the softness of it against his clenched fingers. Every muscle in his entire body went tense. He was as still and immobile as a tree, rooted there to the ground, incapable of anything but waiting out the storm as it shook him.

It can’t be him, he thought.

He took a step closer to the bar and then another, until finally he could set his hand on the end of the countertop to steady himself. The other man didn’t seem to have noticed Ash yet, or else he was resolutely being ignored in the hopes that he would go away and mind his own business.

As far as Ash was concerned, this was his business. Right there, sitting at the bar, was the man he had seen in the well, the one who had inspired him for a few short months and might inspire him again.

And then to find out that this man with the gray hair and weathered face was his former neighbor, the first person he had ever loved when he was just a boy! It was impossible to believe. If anyone had told Ashton that this happened to them, he wouldn’t even have pretended to listen. Now that it had happened to him, he had no choice.

This man, the one with the mournful silver eyes, had abandoned him and broken his heart without so much as a real explanation. After hearing the truth, Ash could sympathize, but he still couldn’t really understand the course things had taken. They could have worked something out. River could have fought back against his parents.

They could have been together all along, as it seemed that they were meant to be.

Except, he knew that was a childish way of thinking. Ash wasn’t the child he’d been when they were torn apart. River had been very dependent on his parents at the time of their separation, despite the fact that he was 18 and an alpha; that was just the way of the wolf. And Ash himself was practically a pup. They couldn’t have done much to change the course of their lives without it going disastrously.

Ash flopped one arm across his eyes and sighed loudly, then squeezed them shut tightly when that darkness wasn’t enough. There was too much going on, too many different inputs interfering with his thoughts. He wished the rest of the world would just cease to exist until he figured this all out.

That wasn’t how the real world worked, however. He might be able to capture a moment in time for all eternity on a canvas, but he was on his own in regards to how his own time passed. He had a handful of hours to put this puzzle together before the world woke up and expected him to get moving right along with it.

Donald told him to his face that there were no risks associated with visiting the well, but that was clearly not to be the case. The pack leader couldn’t have known because he had never been there to experience it for himself, but Ash knew better. He’d informed Donald of what the experience was like as soon as he’d returned home, but now it seemed like he’d have to update the old man about all this.

Because, the well was a trap. It was false hope. It wasn’t a solution to anything. All it succeeded in doing was showing a person that at least part of their future was predetermined. Ash had discovered he was always meant to be with River. Now he had all that lost time to lament over and all the thousand problems that came with that. The two of them were not the boys they had once been.

The more he thought about it, the more potential problems he saw with a visit to the well. A person could see their mate, but then what happened if the two just kept not crossing paths? That would have to be disheartening, devastating, and potentially deadly if the person couldn’t bear the weight of the suspense.

Maybe it hadn’t been worth it at all, not even for the months of increased productivity and profit. He couldn’t escape it now, though. He had to face it.

River was meant to be his mate. There was no way Ash could change his mind about wanting to get to know him again.

At least he would finally get some answers, especially now that he had more questions than ever. He understood that River’s marriage had been anything but enjoyable, but how did the chipper boy he’d known, turn into a man so beaten-down and weary?

“I guess that’s it, then,” he whispered to himself.

As he drifted off to sleep, when his defenses were down, he admitted to himself that he was also looking forward to this. No matter how much time had gone by, River was still bound to be River. They were still themselves. Hell, this might turn out to be easy.

As he was to find out, he was very mistaken.