There had never been a more tired and haggard creature than Kierkegaard – at least, not on those shores. His limbs quivered with each step that he took from the grotto and into open pack terrain. The sun was quick to light his jagged ashen fur in light, and he blinked against the harshness of the rays. Since his return to Grimnismal, the ghost had not left the confines of the grotto and its protective darkness. Caiaphas and her growing belly had been his company, but he had preferred it to anything else the others would have offered him. The silence had been far more appreciated than the companionship of the other pack members.
The trees stood out against the rocky background. On slow and struggled steps, the haggard creature limped his way toward it. Close ahead, there was the shape of a familiar figure, but as the wraith drew closer, he found that it was not Wylla but an unnamed male. Stiffening at the scent of this brute, Kierkegaard clenched his jaw tightly and continued to limp toward the trees without another word.
For a short distance, the stranger followed Kierkegaard. The injured ghost did little to dissuade him, but he did not feel at ease having the unknown so close to his back side. Turning his head a bit, the ashen fellow saw that his companion had trailed to the right to keep a respectful distance. The fur along Kierkegaard’s shoulders danced like quills against the bleak backdrop of the wood. He continued to take a few laborious steps into the thick of their small forest and then he paused with splayed ears and a stiff-legged stance.
“Don’t need a shadow. You can come on over here or piss off,” he growled to the other wolf. Turning his head, the ghost latched his molten stare on the other male’s face and waited expectantly for his pack mate to decide. Kierke would not have cared either way, but he was growing uneasy with the company of the unnamed brute and his quiet, distanced follow.
The stranger emerged, and Kierkegaard found himself marveling at just how similar this brute was to their strong-headed leader. At least, his appearance reflected a strange kinship with Wylla, but his voice spoke a tale of long-distanced travel and a tongue that was forged through another language. The ghost regarded him with a careful expression before he dipped his head and allowed for a laxer air to their conversation. As the stranger drifted closer, Kierkegaard caught sight of the pale violet in his gaze and breathed deep in a sounder comfort that this wolf did not appear to be related to Wylla at all.
“Fall from a cliff,” the ghost responded with a small shrug that ached his shoulder. “Washed up about a week later.” As always, Kierkegaard was a man of few words and he wasn’t fond of delving into the subjects that closely related to his mistakes. Then, with a quick twitch of his dark lips, the ashen creature gestured toward their pack and fixed Mahler with a glinting gaze. “What happened to you? What poor fool convinced you to join this crew of sea dogs?”
Kierkegaard could not hear the thoughts that fluttered through the music-maker’s mind, but he would have disagreed with them if he could. It had not been strength that had pulled him from the ocean swell, but the calling of a spindly hawkish woman. This was a truth that he would never share with another soul, but one that he thought on with grave attention. The determination to return to Caiaphas had been all that it took for the ghost to live again, and to walk back to the sound with only a battered frame. The wounds would heal, and he would not need to provide explanation for his stiff-limbed gait or the large gashes against his shoulders from the jagged rocks below.
The response from Mahler left Kierkegaard with a small gaping mouth and raised brows. Wylla had been what had convinced the brute to join their brood. While this was only moderately shocking, he could not account for the desires of others. If the stranger had been drawn to their fiery leader, there must have been sound reason behind it. Nodding his head solemnly, the ghost offered a shriveled smile. “Good enough reason, I suppose,” he remarked in a casual tone – as casual as he could.
“You hungry?”
“Kierkegaard,” the old brute returned with a bob of his head. Years had allowed him many chances to speak his name, but it had been a rare chance that he took them. It caused him to wonder if the male he walked alongside had taken a similar choice in holding his given moniker close to his vest, or if Mahler was indeed what he had been called since birth. The ghost would have assumed the latter, given that the newcomer did not seem as though he was keen on verbal tricks. It was this reason that he seemed to take well to Mahler’s presence; verbose gestures were often lost on the mercenary.
Trekking inland, the ghost sniffed out one of the caches he had assisted in filling with fish and small game. The brute poked around in what was left before fixing his companion with a questioning glance. It was as if he was asking, do you prefer fish or rabbit?
The inquiry was answered in a tongue that the ashen ghost had not heard in many years. His ears swiveled atop his crown toward the sable brute, and he flashed the other male with a sharp, fiery stare. The fur along his neck and shoulders seemed to bristle slightly, giving him an appearance of a ragged, quilled monster. Kierkegaard drew his tongue along the whiskers of his muzzle before he snorted in response to Mahler’s statement. It was false, at least as far as the mercenary was concerned. With a curling smirk, the wraith bent his neck and scooped a large fish in his mouth before turning and tossing it toward his companion.
“Nein, fisch ist für...“ but his words failed him, and he furrowed his brow into a tightly knit line that sat across his orange-gold stare. “Spindly dogs,“ he then concluded in English, lashing his tongue against his muzzle once more with an amused smirk. It was meant as a jab, but the hound did not much care if Mahler preferred tree bark to rodents; Kierkegaard was only interested in getting a rise from his company. The ghost reached into his cache and pulled a hare from it, clutching the catch between his teeth.
The wraith made a comfortable place and dropped down to rest his weight against his elbows while he worked against the frame of the hare. His yellowed fangs plucked and pulled away at flesh until he had reached sinew, and only then did he begin to truly eat the thing. All the while, Kierkegaard left his gaze to linger on his companion. Mahler was a strange one, to bring up word of their home land. The mercenary had never been fond of calling any one place home, and certainly not where he had been born. There were few things that he had no choice in, and that was one of them. Still, the way that Mahler spoke hinted to a fiery passion regarding their commonality.
After mulling over the offer, the old hound shrugged and frowned. The hare was clasped between his front paws as he pointed his muzzle toward the sable man. “Don’t much see the point. Can’t say I’ve got many years left on me,” Kierkegaard admitted with a careless cant of his skull. While he had never been one to take to the idea of an intellectual journey, his body had fallen into less than favorable condition in regard to physical power. “But, if you’d like, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt none.”
The specter nodded his head in response to the inquiry that fell from Mahler’s lips first. His eyes studied the other man, watching his mannerisms and the way he held himself. The other was welcome, he had decided, finding that the companionship of one so alike should not have bothered him. Finding himself more at ease, the ghostly figure watched as Mahler began in how to state that he would soon be a father. The words were forced to be pieced together in his mind, and even then they were so foreign to him that he was not certain he could fight the embarrassment of speaking the language.
“Ja,” he remarked in a rumble. Then, the ghost fixed the other male with a burning gaze and tried for himself, “ich werde… bald vater sein.” It was rough, challenging for him to work his way through it when he detested spoken word as it was. Looking at Mahler, Kierkegaard canted his head to the left and waited for his criticism.