Blackfeather Woods tillojak

A cry of war sounded against the trunks of the trees and rattled the bear to turn his skull in the direction of the cry. His own prey had been the mark of another. It was not something that he found worrisome. Instead of protectively guarding the frog against the strange ghostly shape, Sos shrunk himself toward the earth and flattened his ears to his skull with a swift jerking of his frame. The earth beneath him offered a sense of comfort against the unknown. Inquisitively, the child moved to peer at the spirit from a different angle. Though he had seen the shapes of his two siblings, the bear had never seen the form of another pup. This was peculiar, as the two litters had grown so very near to each other. Her scent was foreign, alluring in this sense. Sos moved around the thick brush until he had found a perfect place to peer from. There, he saw the silver of her figure as well as the sharpness in her eyes.

Drawing his ears forward, the polar child followed her movements as she pursued the leaping prey through the brush. While it had initially garnered his attention, the fresh sight of youth had done well to distract him from his initial discovery. Had he been any younger, Sos might have been frightened of the stranger and her rowdy ways. Instead, the earth had granted him a strange sort of courage to approach the things he knew little of. It was with this that he took his first few steps in the direction of the stark female puppy. Sos remained close to the ground so that he could pull his strength from it, but his ears stood erect and attentive on Averna. The glimmer of her pallid form was enthralling.

“Who you?”

The only language he knew well enough to inquire in was that of his family's home. The Inuttut fell from his dark lips without much thought as to whether or not this other child could speak it. To Sos, it acted as the language of the world and all things within it. English was still fresh to him, still new, and so he could not have greeted her with it successfully. The challenges of youth seemed to cling to his tongue and hindered his speech there, but his body was open to her. He wanted only to know where she had come from and how he had never noticed her before.