“YOU ARE NOT YOUR FATHER’S SPARE” — A cursed king breaks centuries of silence when an unwanted girl changes everything forever
Her father’s voice carried through the great hall like a whip crack.
“And this one,” he said, his hand closing around her arm hard enough to bruise, “is the spare.”
Laughter rippled through the gathered wolves, low, obedient laughter, the kind that follows cruelty when cruelty comes from a man with power.
Lord Harun Voss, alpha of the Ashen Moor pack, shoved his youngest daughter forward until she stumbled on the stone floor, her knees striking cold granite.
His two elder daughters stood behind him in silk gowns, their chins lifted, their smiles rehearsed.
They were the offering. She was the footnote. Elara Voss did not cry.
She had stopped crying at 12 the night her father locked her in the cellar for speaking out of turn at a feast.
She rose from the floor with her hands steady and her spine straight, and she did not look at her father.
She looked past him, past the silk daughters and the sneering court wolves.
She looked directly at the throne. The alpha king had not moved.
He’d been still for the entirety of the procession, unnervingly, impossibly still, like a predator who had decided that nothing in the room was worth the effort of motion.
King Draven Blackmere sat on a throne carved from the bones of wolves who had challenged his bloodline and lost.
His jaw was set. His eyes were pale gray, the color of winter sky before a storm, and they had not left Elara’s face since the moment she entered the hall.
Not her sisters. Not their silk. Not Lord Harun’s bowing and scraping.
Her. Now, in the silence that followed the laughter, Draven Blackmere did something no one expected.
He reached up, lifted the iron crown from his head, and set it on the stone table beside his throne.
The sound it made, metal on granite, rang through the hall like a death knell.
Then he stood. The entire room stopped breathing. He was enormous.
That was the first thing Elara registered, not his title, not his reputation, but the sheer physical scale of the man descending from the dais.
His shoulders blocked the firelight behind him. His boots struck the stone floor with a rhythm that made her think of a war drum, steady and unhurried and absolute.
His dark hair fell past his jaw, and his face, carved, hard, beautiful in the way a blade is beautiful, held no expression at all.
But his eyes, his eyes burned. He walked past Lord Harun without a glance, past the elder daughters who shrank back despite themselves, past the assembled alphas and their retinues, past the beta who stepped forward with a hand raised in uncertain warning.
He stopped in front of Elara. She was close enough to feel the heat radiating from his skin, close enough to see the scar that ran from his left temple down past his jaw and disappeared beneath the collar of his black tunic, close enough to hear the low sound building in his chest, not quite a growl, not quite a breath, something older than both.
“What is your name?” His voice was deep and rough, as though he had not used it in a long time, as though speaking was something he had forgotten how to do gently.
“Elara.” She did not add her family name. She did not say, “My lord,” or, “Your majesty.”
She simply gave him the only thing that was hers.
Something shifted behind his eyes, a crack in stone, a fissure in ice.
“Elara,” he repeated. And the way he said it, low, slow, as if tasting the shape of it, made every wolf in the room go rigid.
He turned to Lord Harun. The older alpha had gone pale.
Whatever he saw in the king’s face made his practiced smile collapse like wet parchment.
“This one,” Draven said, “is not your spare.” He did not explain.
He did not ask permission. He extended his hand to Elara, palm up, open, a gesture that looked nothing like a command and everything like an offering, and waited.
The hall was silent. 40 wolves, six alphas, a dozen ranked warriors, and not one of them breathed.
Elara looked at his hand. She looked at the scars across his knuckles, the size of his fingers, the stillness with which he held them.
She thought about every night she had spent in cold rooms with no fire because she was not worth the wood.
Every meal eaten standing because there was no chair for the spare.
Every bruise her father left where clothing would cover it.
She placed her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, and a tremor ran through him, visible, involuntary, like a man shocked by lightning.
His eyes flickered, the pale gray bright to something almost luminous, and for one heartbeat, she saw it.
Not the king. Not the alpha. But something raw and startled and desperate underneath.
Then the mask returned. He turned, her hand still in his, and walked toward the doors of the great hall.
The crowd parted like water before a blade. Lord Harun Voss opened his mouth to protest.
Draven did not turn around. “If you speak,” he said, his voice carrying the quiet authority of absolute power, “I will hear it as a challenge, and I have not lost a challenge in 400 years.”
Harun’s mouth closed. The doors opened. The night air poured in, cold, sharp, carrying the scent of pine and frost and distant wolves howling from the mountain passes.
Draven led Elara out of the hall, out of the world she had known, and into his.
Behind them, the iron crown sat on the table where he had left it, cold and untouched, as though it no longer mattered.
The fortress of Thornhold was carved into the face of a granite cliff, and it was the coldest place Elara had ever entered.
Not cold in the way of winter, cold in the way of absence.
The hearths were enormous, but the fires burned low, as though the flames themselves were reluctant to commit.
The stone corridors stretched long and gray, lit by torches that flickered without warmth.
Servants moved in silence, their eyes averted, their footsteps careful.
No laughter. No music. No color. Draven released her hand the moment they crossed the threshold, and the loss of contact was so sudden it felt physical, a warmth withdrawn.
He walked ahead of her, his stride lengthening, the brief crack in his composure sealed shut as though it had never existed.
“You will have rooms in the east tower,” he said without turning.
“Food will be brought, clothing, whatever you require.” “Why?” Elara asked.
He stopped. She watched his shoulders tense beneath the black leather of his tunic.
Slowly, he turned. The torchlight caught the scar on his face, and she realized it was not a battle wound.
The edges were too precise, too deliberate. Someone had carved that line into his skin with intention.
“Why war? Why me? You had two daughters of noble blood presented to you in silk.
You chose the one in a torn dress with bare feet.”
She held his gaze. “I am asking you, why?” Something moved behind his expression, a flicker of surprise, quickly buried.
“You are not afraid of me.” “Should I be?” “Everyone is afraid of me.”
“Then perhaps everyone has not spent 19 years sleeping in cellars and learning that fear is a luxury for people with something to lose.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Draven stared at her as though she had spoken in a language he had forgotten, one he had not heard since childhood.
His jaw worked. His hands hanging at his sides trembled once, then went still.
“My wolf chose you,” he said finally. His voice had changed, quieter, stripped of authority, leaving only honesty beneath.
“The moment you entered that hall, he went silent for the first time in 300 years.
And then he howled.” Elara did not know what to say to that.
She did not fully understand what it meant. She had never shifted, never felt the pull of the wolf that was supposed to live inside her.
Her father had told her she was defective, broken, wolfless.
But standing in this frozen corridor, looking up at a king who trembled when she asked him a simple question, she felt something stir in her chest.
Not a wolf. Not yet. Something deeper. Something waiting. “300 years,” she said softly.
He did not answer. He turned and walked away, and she understood that he had already said more than he intended.
More, perhaps, than he had said to anyone in a very long time.
A small woman appeared at Elara’s elbow, gray-haired, sharp-eyed, with the calloused hands of someone who had worked every day of her life.
She wore the simple wool of a servant and she smelled of bread and dried lavender.
“I am Maren,” she said. “I will show you to your rooms.
And if you are wise, you will not ask the king questions he has spent centuries avoiding.
And if I am not wise?” Maren studied her for a long moment.
Then, unexpectedly, she smiled. “Then perhaps you are exactly what this place needs.”
The first three days taught Elara the shape of Draven’s suffering.
It was not metaphorical. The curse was physical, visible, relentless.
She learned it first from Maren, who spoke carefully, choosing her words like stepping stones across a river.
The king had been cursed three centuries ago by a scorned witch of the old bloodlines, a woman he had refused to take as Luna after the death of his first mate.
The curse was elegant in its cruelty. It stripped him of sensation, touch, taste, warmth, comfort, all of it gone.
He could feel pain, he could feel cold, but nothing gentle, nothing kind, nothing that might make existence bearable.
He had not slept in 300 years. Sleep required the body to release, to trust, to soften.
His body had forgotten how. Elara learned the rest by watching.
She saw how he held his food without tasting it, chewing mechanically, swallowing without pleasure.
She saw how he stood too close to the hearth fire, his hand inches from the flame, searching for warmth his skin could not register.
She saw the way he moved through his own fortress like a ghost haunting the rooms of a life he could no longer access.
On the third night, she found him in the great hall alone.
The fire had burned down to embers, casting the room in dim orange light.
He sat on the floor beside the hearth, not on the throne, not in a chair, but on the cold stone, his back against the wall, his eyes open and fixed on nothing.
“You should be in your rooms,” he said without looking at her.
“I could not sleep, either.” She sat down across from him, close enough to speak quietly, far enough that the space between them felt deliberate.
“Maren told me about the curse.” His jaw tightened. “Maren talks too much.”
“She cares about you.” “That is not the same thing.”
He said nothing. The embers popped and shifted, sending a brief shower of sparks upward.
“300 years,” Elara said. “What does it feel like to go that long without warmth?”
“You ask questions no one else asks.” “Because everyone else is afraid of the answers.”
“I told you, I have nothing to lose.” He turned his head then, and the look he gave her was not the cold authority of the alpha king.
It was something stripped bare, something exhausted and honest and close to breaking.
“It feels like drowning,” he said slowly, “in a room full of air.
Everything is right there, warmth, comfort, rest. I can see it.
I can watch other people experience it, but my hands pass through it like smoke.”
He paused. His voice dropped. “After the first century, you stop reaching.
After the second, you forget what you were reaching for.
After the third He trailed off. “After the third?” She prompted gently.
“You start to wonder if you were ever alive at all.”
The words hung between them like frost in the air.
Elara did not offer comfort. She did not say it would be all right because she did not know that it would.
She simply sat with him in the dim light of the dying fire and let the silence hold the weight of what he had confessed.
After a long time, she reached out and placed her hand on the stone floor between them, not touching him, just close, an offering without pressure, a presence without demand.
Draven looked at her hand, then, slowly, as though the motion cost him something enormous, he moved his own hand until his fingers rested beside hers, not touching, not quite.
Close enough that the heat from her skin should have reached his.
“I cannot feel it,” he whispered, “but I know it is there.”
The court noticed. Lord Fenris, the king’s chief advisor and a wolf whose ambition had been poorly hidden for decades, noticed most of all.
He was a tall, angular man with a silver-streaked beard and the kind of smile that never reached his eyes.
He had served three generations of Blackmere kings and he had spent those generations positioning himself as indispensable.
An omega from a minor pack, because that was what Elara was, no matter how her father styled himself as alpha, sitting beside the king’s hearth threatened everything Fenris had built.
He began with whispers, subtle words dropped into conversations at the training grounds, in the kitchens, among the ranked warriors.
“She is wolfless. She cannot shift. She is unworthy of the bond.
The king is compromised. The curse has finally taken his mind.”
Elara heard the whispers. She had spent her life hearing whispers.
They slid off her like rain off stone. But on the seventh day, Fenris stopped whispering.
The morning court was in session, a formal gathering where disputes were heard and judgments rendered.
Elara had been invited by Draven, a gesture that had set the court murmuring before she even entered the hall.
She sat in a chair to the left of the throne, a position traditionally reserved for the Luna.
Fenris stood before the assembled wolves and spoke with the practiced authority of a man who had been rehearsing this moment.
“My king, the pack grows restless. There are concerns, legitimate concerns, about the woman you have brought into Thornhold.
She has no rank, no bloodline of consequence. She has never shifted.
She is, by every measure of our law, unqualified to sit where she sits.”
The hall went quiet. Elara felt the weight of 60 pairs of eyes.
Draven’s expression did not change. “Is that a concern, Fenris, or a challenge?”
“It is counsel, your majesty, offered with the respect your throne deserves.”
“Then let me offer counsel in return.” Draven leaned forward and the temperature in the hall seemed to drop.
“The woman sitting beside me walked into a court full of wolves who despised her, sat in a chair that a dozen she-wolves would kill for, and has not flinched once during your performance.
She has more steel in her silence than you have shown in 60 years of service.”
His voice lowered to something barely above a whisper, but it carried to every corner of the room.
“Question her presence again, and I will interpret it as a question of my judgment.
And I think you know how I answer those questions.”
Fenris bowed, his smile intact, his eyes burning with something that looked nothing like surrender.
Elara kept her face still. Her hands, folded in her lap, did not shake.
But beneath her composed exterior, something was shifting. A warmth in her chest, a low vibration she had never felt before, like a heartbeat that was not entirely her own.
That night, she stood at the window of her tower room and pressed her hand to the cold glass.
The moon hung heavy over the mountains and in the forests below, wolves howled.
She had never howled back. She had never had anything to howl for.
But the sound in her chest was growing louder. If you’re enjoying this story, go ahead and hit that like button to let me know you want more tales like this one.
The curse struck on the 10th night. Elara was in the library, a vast, vaulted room that smelled of old leather and dust and the faint ghost of ink.
She had found a book of wolf histories, handwritten in a script so old it was nearly illegible, and she was reading aloud to herself when Draven appeared in the doorway.
She had grown accustomed to his presence, the way he filled a room without trying, the way his silence had its own gravity.
But tonight, something was different. He stood in the doorway with one hand braced against the stone frame and his breathing was wrong, ragged, shallow.
The scar on his face looked darker, as though shadow was pooling in the carved line.
“Draven?” She stood, the book forgotten. Stay back. The words came through gritted teeth.
His eyes were flickering, pale gray to something brighter, something inhuman.
His wolf was pressing against the surface, and the effort of holding it back was written across every line of his body.
She did not stay back. She crossed the room and stopped an arm’s length from him.
She could see it now. Dark veins crawling beneath the skin of his hands, his neck, spreading like frost across a windowpane.
The curse manifesting physically. Fighting against whatever fragile hope had begun to form in the space between them.
It is getting worse, she said. Not a question. It punishes hope.
His voice was barely recognizable. Low, fractured, torn between the man and the wolf.
Every time I Every time something feels close to warmth, it tightens.
It reminds me what I am. And what are you?
His eyes found hers, and in them she saw centuries of exhaustion, of cold, of reaching for something that dissolved at his touch.
A dead thing wearing a crown. Ilara reached for his hand.
Don’t. The word was wrenched from him. You cannot feel what happens when the curse Her fingers closed around his.
Draven went rigid. His entire body locked, every muscle seizing as though braced against an impact.
The dark veins on his skin pulsed, crawling toward the point of contact, toward her fingers wrapped around his.
For a terrible, suspended moment, Ilara felt it. Cold so profound it burned.
A void that swallowed sensation and gave back nothing. Then, beneath the cold, something else.
A flicker. Faint and desperate and alive, like a single ember buried under ash.
Warmth. Draven gasped. Not a sound of pain. A sound of shock.
Of recognition. His eyes went wide and the gray irises blazed silver, and his fingers, trembling violently, closed around hers as though she were the only solid thing in a world made of smoke.
I felt that, he breathed. Ilara, I felt The dark veins recoiled from her touch like living things flinching from flame.
They receded up his arm, past his shoulder, disappearing beneath his collar.
His breathing steadied. The inhuman light in his eyes dimmed to something almost human, almost gentle, almost shattered with wonder.
He looked down at their joined hands. His thumb moved across her knuckles.
A slow, experimental motion, as though testing whether sensation was real or hallucination.
Warm, he said. And his voice cracked on the word like a man who had forgotten how to say it.
Ilara’s eyes burned. She did not cry. She had not cried since she was 12.
But standing in this dusty library, holding the hand of a king who had not felt warmth in three centuries, watching his face open like a door that had been locked for lifetimes, she came closer than she had in seven years.
From the corridor outside, unseen, Lord Fenris watched. His silver eyes narrowed.
His hand moved to the small vial concealed in his robes.
A vial of black liquid that smelled of ash and old blood.
The curse had a keeper. And the keeper had no intention of letting it break.
The next three days were the closest thing to peace Thornhold had seen in 300 years.
It came in small moments. Draven found Ilara in the kitchen garden, a barren square of frozen earth behind the fortress, and stood beside her while she turned the soil with bare hands, her fingers red with cold, planting seeds she had found in a forgotten storeroom.
Nothing will grow here, he said. The ground has been frozen since the curse.
Then it will be the first thing that thaws. He watched her work.
She did not ask him to help. She did not perform her kindness for an audience.
She simply knelt in the frozen dirt and planted seeds as though she believed in something the rest of the world had given up on.
The next morning, a single green shoot broke through the soil.
The kitchen staff gathered around it and stared as though witnessing a miracle.
In a fortress where nothing had grown for three centuries, perhaps it was.
But Fenris moved in the shadows. He poured the black liquid into the king’s evening wine, not enough to kill, but enough to amplify the curse tenfold.
That night, Draven collapsed in the great hall during evening court.
The dark veins erupted across his skin, covering his face, his hands, his chest.
His body convulsed on the stone floor, and the sound that tore from his throat was not human.
Ilara ran to him. The court scattered. Only Maren stood her ground, her old face white with fear.
Do not touch him, Fenris commanded, stepping forward with practiced urgency.
The curse is devouring him. Anyone who touches him will be consumed.
Ilara looked at Fenris. She looked at his steady hands, his composed expression, the careful performance of concern.
She looked at the way his eyes flickered. Not to Draven on the floor, but to her.
Measuring. Calculating. You did this, she said. The hall went silent.
Fenris’s mask held. The girl is hysterical. She has no understanding of Your hands are steady.
Ilara’s voice was quiet, but it carried. Your king is dying on the floor, and your hands are not shaking.
Every wolf in this room is terrified except you. She turned to the gathered court.
He is not afraid because he knows exactly what is happening.
Because he made it happen. Fenris’s composure cracked for one heartbeat.
One flash of fury in his silver eyes, and that was enough.
The wolves saw it. The beta, a massive warrior named Kale, who had stood silent through weeks of political maneuvering, stepped forward and placed himself between Fenris and the king.
Do not move. Kale said to the advisor. Ilara dropped to her knees beside Draven.
The dark veins were consuming him. His skin was turning gray, his breath was failing, and his eyes, when they found hers, were filled with something she had never seen in them before.
Fear. Not of death. Of losing this. Of losing her.
Of sinking back into the void after three days of remembering what warmth felt like.
Ilara. Her name broken on his lips. Go. The curse will She placed both hands on his chest.
The cold hit her like a wall of black water.
It poured into her, through her, filling her lungs and her blood and her bones with a darkness so complete it had weight, texture, intent.
This was not absence of warmth. This was hatred of warmth.
This was three centuries of spite and isolation and frozen rage compressed into a force that wanted to devour everything gentle in the world.
And somewhere inside Ilara, in the place where her wolf had been sleeping for 19 years, in the hollow her father had told her was empty, in the space she had believed was broken, something woke up.
It did not rise gently. It erupted. Light poured from her hands, not golden, not white, but the deep amber of hearth fire, of autumn sun, of warmth so fundamental it predated language.
It flooded through Draven’s chest and met the darkness, and the darkness screamed.
The sound was not audible. It was felt. A vibration that shook the stone walls and cracked the frost on the windows and made every wolf in the hall stagger.
Ilara held on. The cold tore at her, tried to pry her hands away, tried to fill her with the same void it had carved into Draven.
She felt it whispering. You are nothing. You are the spare.
You are wolfless and worthless. And no one has ever wanted you.
She had heard those words before. She had heard them from her father, from her sisters, from every wolf who had ever looked through her as though she were not there.
She had survived them then. She would survive them now.
You do not get to keep him, she said through gritted teeth, and the light in her hands blazed brighter.
The dark veins shattered. They did not recede. They broke apart, fracturing like black glass, dissolving into smoke that rose from Draven’s skin and dissipated into the cold air of the great hall.
The sound of their breaking was like ice cracking on a river in spring, sharp, violent, and full of promise.
Draven arched off the floor with a gasp that sounded like a man who had been held under water for 300 years finally breaking the surface.
Color flooded his skin. Actual color. Warmth and life replacing the gray pallor that had been his face for centuries.
His eyes flew open and they were no longer pale gray.
They were silver. Bright and clear and alive. And they found Elara’s face with the desperate focus of a man seeing light for the first time.
Across the hall, Fenris lunged for the door. Kael caught him by the collar and drove him to the floor with the efficiency of a wolf who had been waiting years for permission.
The small green shoot in the kitchen garden split the frozen earth wide open.
By morning, it would be a vine. By week’s end, the garden would be in full bloom.
Draven sat on the edge of his bed, a bed he had not slept in for 300 years, and stared at his own hands.
He pressed his fingers together and felt the pressure. He ran his palm across the wool blanket and felt the texture, rough and warm and real.
He lifted a cup of water to his lips and tasted it.
Clean and cold. And the sensation was so ordinary and so miraculous that he had to set the cup down because his hands were shaking.
Elara stood in the doorway watching him rediscover the world.
“Everything is loud.” He said. His voice was rough with something she realized with a start was emotion.
Unfiltered, uncontrolled emotion. The kind that floods in when the dam that held it back for centuries finally breaks.
“The fire is warm. The stone is cold. The air smells like Elara, the air smells like pine.
When did the air start smelling like pine?” “It always did.”
She said softly. “You just could not reach it.” He looked at her.
The mask was gone. The walls were gone. The cold untouchable king who had ruled through fear and stillness and silence was gone.
And in his place was a man scarred and exhausted and overwhelmed and looking at her as though she were the answer to a question he had stopped asking two centuries ago.
“Come here.” He said. Not a command, a request. She crossed the room.
He reached for her hand and when their fingers intertwined, he closed his eyes and inhaled sharply.
And she watched his entire body shudder with the simple devastating sensation of being touched by someone who meant it.
“I have not felt anything kind in 300 years.” He said.
“And the first thing I felt was you.” He lifted her hand and pressed his lips to her knuckles.
Gentle. Reverent. Trembling. Then he looked up at her with those new silver eyes and said the words that cost a king everything.
“I do not deserve what you have given me. I know that.
A cursed king who let the darkness eat him alive for three centuries has no right to ask anything of the woman who burned it out of him with her bare hands.”
His voice broke. He let it break. “But I am asking.
Stay. Not as a guest, not as a rescued girl.
Stay as my Luna. Stay as my mate. Stay because I cannot go back to the cold now that I know what warmth feels like.
And you are every fire I have ever failed to light.”
Elara cupped his face in her hands. She traced the scar with her thumb.
The scar that had faded, she realized. Not gone, but lighter.
As though even the mark of old cruelty was losing its hold.
“I spent 19 years being told I was nothing.” She said.
“I will spend the rest of my life in a place where I am something.”
“Yes.” He kissed her. It was not gentle. It was not careful.
It was the kiss of a man who had not felt warmth in three centuries.
Desperate and aching and full of a hunger that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the terrifying exhilarating discovery that he was still alive.
She felt the bond snap into place between them. Not her imagination, not hope, but something real and unbreakable and ancient.
A thread of fire connecting her chest to his. And deep inside her, the wolf that had slept for 19 years opened its eyes.
Three months later, the kingdom of Thornhold was unrecognizable. The kitchen garden had become a sprawling green riot of herbs and vegetables and climbing roses that scaled the fortress walls as though making up for three centuries of dormancy.
The hearth fires burned high and bright and the halls that had been gray and silent now held the sound of conversation, of laughter, of boots on stone and doors opening instead of closing.
Luna Elara sat in the great hall with a stack of petitions from outlying villages.
Maren at her side offering unsolicited commentary on each request.
Draven had learned to sleep, not easily, not yet through an entire night, but enough.
He still woke sometimes in the dark hours, his hand reaching for her in a panic that faded the moment his fingers found her warmth beside him.
He slept. After 300 years, he slept. And he dreamed.
Lord Fenris sat in a cell beneath the fortress, stripped of rank and title.
His treachery exposed to every pack in the northern territories.
He had maintained the curse for decades, feeding it with dark alchemy, keeping the king frozen and dependent on his council.
The revelation had shattered what remained of his influence. He would rot in the dark he had cultivated.
On a morning in late spring, a letter arrived bearing the seal of the Ashanmore pack.
Elara opened it at the breakfast table while Draven watched her with the quiet steady attention of a man who would never tire of watching her.
The letter was from her father. Lord Haran Voss, whose eldest daughters had failed to secure alliances of their own.
Whose pack had dwindled in the months since the Alpha King’s fury became known.
Who had finally understood the magnitude of what he had discarded.
Wrote three pages of groveling apology. He begged her forgiveness.
He begged an audience. He begged her to remember that she was his daughter.
Elara read the letter. She folded it neatly. She set it beside her plate.
“What will you do?” Draven asked. She looked at him.
Her mate. Her king. The man who had set down his crown and walked across a great hall for her when the rest of the world had stepped over her without looking down.
“I will write back.” She said. “I will tell him that his spare is doing quite well.”
Draven smiled. It was still a rare thing, his smile.
A slow uncertain movement as though the muscles had forgotten the shape.
But it was real. And it was warm. And it was hers.
Outside the walls of Thornhold howled in the morning light.
And for the first time in 300 years, the sound was not mournful.
