Northstar Vale tea leaves

@Dusty Rose whenever! <3

epoch had never named the third and fourth lakes. tamar visited each as night crept over the vale. the third lake was a sprawl of grey sand and shallow edges where turtles clustered.

the fourth lake was punctuated by boulders lifting from the current. she leapt to one and then another, the moon shining twice, once in the sky, once below upon the surface of the water.

another jutting stone, another, another, until she lightly bounded back the way she had come,  a streak of golden red whisking from one rock to the next.

They stayed nearby one another, much of the time. Even now, Dusty Rose was within singing distance of his companion. This new reliance was as uncomfortable as every other step had been, but somehow, the coywolf could not stop himself from walking the path anyway.

And look — he was acclimating. He was realizing he'd put up with quite a bit of it made Reverie happy.

He was realizing that quite a bit of it made him happy.

So he was in a good mood as he made his careful way down the ridge and into the valley below. It meant that his tail wheeled instead of bristling when he saw a darting figure not far below. Without thinking, he tipped back his head to sing a warbling hello.

the sound stilled tamar.

she paused in reaching for the next stone again, soft ears lifted in curiosity. pale gaze searched and she found the shades of him next.

it was not a sound she was used to making. a rejoinder rose in her throat all the same; thrumming; and she sang back!

the golden tail waved, telegraphing her curiosity but tamar did not approach.

When the returning song was friendly, the coywolf thought nothing of closing the distance between them. There was a whisper of instinct telling him to chase off this contender, female or no — but either his wolf blood was too strong or his bond with Reverie was too weak. He couldn't bring himself to see any threat in her. Especially not once he was close enough to see their similarities.

"Hey," he chirped, liquid blue eyes bright an inquisitive. "You don't look like you're from around here. Not anymore than me, I mean."

Was she from the Red Desert, too? Dusty Rose doubted it, but he wanted to know more about her either way.

"My name's Dusty Rose," he added, remembering his manners.

he was pretty.

perhaps more than that, an intrinsic pull toward one who resembled her. the swanwater depths of his sunny blue eyes did little to quell the initial sensation. 

reminding herself that she was only battling insecurity in these times, the desertine offered a small smile of welcome. "i am tamar."

she did not offer her surname; she did not know why. "and i am not from this place. but i have come to love it."

Tamar. 

Pretty, the coywolf thought. He tucked the name away in the back of his mind the way he tucked colorful feathers into Reverie's hollow. 

When he looked at her, he couldn't help seeing her mixed heritage before anything else. No one likes coywolves (except Dusty was beginning to think this wasn't always true) and she was very obviously a coywolf. He wondered what sort of discrimination she'd faced, and then wondered what sort of creature these things had made her into. She seemed sweet, to him. Soft.

He danced closer, his tail still wheeling at his hocks. The way he looked at her, though — not unpleasantly, for he did not intend to have an unpleasant time. But it was the way he looked at a rabbit when he wasn't hungry enough to hunt. The way that he sometimes looked at Reverie's daughters — with interest, with curious intent, with the knowledge that it was not polite to bite them but without any of the natural inhibition that stopped others from doing so.

Dusty Rose did not lunge for the woman yet. He thought he might want to play. Tamar was too big to play with without her cooperation.

"You've got people here?" he asked her, circling her to try and get a better look. He hadn't seen another coywolf since he'd left his own family behind. It was nostalgic to look upon her. It was uncanny.

he was nothing like a wolf.

tamar, who had not thought of herself as unwolf in a very long while, now saw herself through the deep intrigue in those azurite eyes; the set of her own jaw, the largeness of her ears, the way flank and femur and shoulder, even down to the bounce of his tailtip was different, and thus she was also.

"a daughter," tamar murmured quietly, unsure whether or not she would return to find arsenio still waiting for her on the plateau. for a moment her pale eyes were transfixed with a splendid hurt, and then she was reflective again, warming.

it had been a long time since anyone had watched her so avidly. that he was pleasant to the eye provided a honeyed nature to their meeting. but more than either of these things, tamar found herself amused. "what about you?"

Dusty Rose wondered if others saw him like this. Something about her evoked a prey drive in him, which was not unusual even among wolves — but she did not react as a prey animal, and he liked to think that he didn't, either. Were wolves frustrated, then? When he did not turn tail and run so that they could give chase? Were they disgusted with him when he did not make it easy to chew the marrow from his bones?

Pretender, a voice whispered in his ear.

Sabandija.

Little vulture.

"I got a girl," he told her. He imagined they were showing each other their scars. Was her life a war story, too? "And she's got three girls. They're mine, now."

Won from a wolf. He would teach them how to stand fawnlike in front of a predator like the woman before him. He would teach them that no wolf could look down on them. That they were the only ones worthy of judging themselves.

"They're wolves, though," he told her. "A wolf-dog, anyway. And her girls somethin' like it."

He was quiet, and then:

"Sorta feels like I pulled one over on her," he admitted. "Maybe just 'cause I know that's what everyone else'll think. I didn't, though."

his possessiveness piqued her.

she had seen the same in arsenio. but he was wolf where this one was only half. yet perhaps it was the wolven half which drove the same insistence. 

"if she loves you, she will not care," tamar said softly, examining the sand which clung to one paw, and then the grains upon his own. "you tend her children as your own? it is all a mother wants, dusty rose."

a velvet look followed; i know this to be true.

"my husband is a wolf. we had many children." all gone now.

Of course he was — they rarely married down outside of the desert. Even there, it was not seen kindly. A pureblooded wolf could take a coyote mate and be seen as indulgent, but a coywolf would only be seen as pitiful. This was how it had been where he was from, anyway.

"Where are they?" he asked, knowing it was a rude question but needing to know the answer. He felt odd confiding in her, but who else might understand these things?

"With kids... sometimes I think I couldn't do this to someone else," he admitted. "But other times I can't think of anything I'd rather be. We're the best of both worlds, aren't we? And we're beautiful."

This, he knew, was the truth.

"But a lotta wolves don't think like that," he said quietly. "And a lotta wolves are gonna be bigger than me. Bigger than my kids."

"they chose to leave early."

"but maybe it was never early for them." mostly wolf with a touch of coyote, perhaps it had been that vestige they all answered in the end. 

her heart sang with hurt. she wanted to tell him she had rarely ever felt beautiful in her life. but was that the coywolf which spoke, or the woman?

"i was a slave to them." tamar slowly rose, charged with a new, restless energy. "i know their cruelty. they are grandiose beings. stay away from those who call themselves royal. see that your children do the same."

a softening; a slight expression of encouragement. 

and her heart spoke and said that her children had been led away for the vile wickedness she had allowed arsenio and germanicus to commit.

"Maybe," he allowed, for her sake, but he thought that it was a damn shame they were gone from her. Kids needed their parents. They needed them long after they were done being kids, he was pretty sure. He hoped they would find her before it was too late for them all —

But these things happened.

His ears fell back in distaste. Grandiose was a word he associated with his own kin, and he didn't like hearing it applied to wolves instead. Yet he knew what she meant. They were a different sort of grandiose; the kind that sought power over others rather than in oneself.

"I'm sorry for your loss," he said sincerely, with more feeling than was required of him. He had not yet experienced that sort of hurt, but he feared it so well that he felt that he knew it. Wolves — he liked them less every time he thought of them. "I'll keep your warning close to my heart. They won't suffer the same. Maybe that will help you rest."

They had to look out for one another, they coywolves. He hoped it would bring her some peace to know that she'd done her part.

a part of her wished a touch.

not a caress nor even an expression of familiarity; tamar found herself suddenly wondering if his fur was like her own, if the warmth of gentle ears were veined as hers were.

if he saw her as other, less than wolf. more? 

"that is all that can be done, yes?" her mouth came up in a smiling curve, but the shoulder she shrugged was cast in sadness.

yet it was not for him to bear. "there are rabbits not far from here. i am going to hunt them before i go." her ears flicked, for she was afraid to ask him to join as she did not wish to be declined. in this way he was also given room to decline all the same, and she conveyed this with a gentle swing of her tail.

Dusty Rose watched her. She was pretty to him in a way that was different that most. Provocative, though he was at loath to admit to such a thing. Even Reverie had seemed to him like a thing made of amber before she'd been a living woman. It disturbed him, but for a moment he imagined a life in the desert, another coywolf at his side.

The image left him uneasy, and it was an uneasy step that he took back.

Whatever kinship he felt toward her, she was not his One. She was other, and ultimately, she was nothing to him. This was the way of his people; he assumed that it was the way of hers.

"Good luck," he told her, his voice gone remote. He looked at her strangely before he said it once more with feeling: "Good luck. Keep your paws quick out there."

But then he had nothing more to say — and a woman to be getting back to.