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| - No sooner was she out the cubhood gates then she was tearing off at full speed. It was straight into the Sept Alpha Megan’s honorable Stag pack, by invitation no less, along with her cousin who was tribe elder and with other elders and high rankers. Starved as she was for learning any rite or gift someone would teach her, it wasn’t long before she had wedged herself in the position of first Master of Rites and then Gatekeeper - all while she was still Cliath. A surprise marriage to Glass Walker kinfolk, Jeremy, and two kinfolk sons later and she felt up to snuff to challenge for Fostern. She completed her tests and was waiting for final acknowledgement. Then it all crashed down. A dispute with a Shadow Lord over territory and the rights of her husband to defend himself blew rapidly into an ugly storm. Dakota, feeling in the right and bolstered by years of sitting on a pedestal and her own ego, felt confident enough to even snarl in the face of the Adren sept alpha. With punishments about to be rained down on her and her husband facing the death penalty, the Child of Gaia sent her family into hiding and fled to the Western Eye in the early months of 2008. She didn’t escape punishment entirely. While her fellow tribemates were sympathetic to her wanting to protect her family, having abandoned her position of Gatekeeper was still a severe fault. To earn her place at the sept, redeem her failure, and to earn the right to re-challenge for her ungiven rank she would spend the entire span of five years, a year for each phase of the moon, assisting the Guardians and Elders and confined to the bawn. It was her sole duty to rededicate herself only to Gaia and the well-being of the caern. And so for five years, she was the lowest of the sept, performing whatever duties the resident Garou saw fit for her to assist with. One fight was brutal enough it left her right arm hanging by threads, an injury that almost killed her and remains a deep scar to this day. Most of it was peaceful, and she used her time in penance to continue to learn from the wise elder Theurges. In the spring of 2011, she was deemed to have completed her service. Humbler and wiser, she recreated the talens she had for her initially failed Fostern challenge. The Elders accepted, and she was given rank and place among the sept. For all she had finally succeeded, it was with a great cost. Her relationship with Jeremy was badly strained, her sons, only infants when she last truly saw them, not children who didn’t know her. While the family worked to repair their void, old fears on Jeremy’s part about the Garou would keep him separated and he travelled frequently with the boys to avoid anyone still looking for him, though he did help from the shadows when he could. In the meantime, Dakota had joined with the Guardian pack under Moose to put her years of bawn knowledge to use. She hadn’t quite paid attention to the totem’s ban, however, and when spring rolled back around she was made aware Moose insisted his followers find the strongest mate and breed. Awkward. Her husband was over in Thailand and neither able to reach the other. So, having come to be familiar with the local kinpack hidden in the Muir Woods, Dakota sought her mate among them. In the spring of 2012 she gave birth to three pups, one of whom had bred true. She watched over them until they were old enough to be tended by the pack before returning to her duties. For all she was doing well, something just wasn’t right. Her abandonment of the Hidden Walk still haunted her and ultimately she decided she needed to go tie up loose ends. Alicia grudgingly followed her back north, and Dakota returned to the Hidden Walk in April of 2014. She had her meets and greets with old and new faces upon her return and found that over all there wasn’t much in the way of bad blood. Bolstered, she made amends to the Garou she had felt she wronged - among them Jamethon, one of her oldest teachers and peers, who had nominated her personally for the very position of Gatekeeper that she had abandoned. A brief trial later and her apology was accepted. Settling back into her old home, Dakota came to the decision to stay and ultimately began a new back with Alicia under the Black Unicorn. Since then, she’s been helping topple DNA, razing the Hellfire pack who followed Green Dragon and even summoning the Talons of Horus to battle the corrupt totem, and rescuing an infant Spiral Homid cub that came to be adopted by her cousin and Alicia’s kinfolk brother, Benedict, after she and Jamethon Exorcised the Black Spiral kinfetch. In October of 2014, as the resident Ritemistress stepped down to attend other duties, Dakota felt confident enough to step up. In December of that year, she even developed a brand new ritual of Honoring The Spirit Friend. Bolstered by her successes, she challenged her old friend Kevin for the rank of Adren and succeeded at the turn of 2015.
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