Shimmering Sands the inner claims i hadn't breadth to shake

Someone has been drinking and it is me.

Like Amoxtli, Coelacanth could not remember the sound of her own voice; the passage of air from her slender muzzle, whether swift and exuberant or slow and cajoling, was merely decorative. With her brother, the inky sheepdog cross never seemed to need words. He was the sun around which her universe fell into orbit, and his optimistic disposition brightened the darkness that sometimes billowed around her. Seelie was more inclined to mourn the voice she lacked — her brother was sunset, and like the order of their birth, she followed him; she was night. At times brisk and enticing — at times comforting and close — she was the yin to his yang: the tapestry against which his light shone, the moonlight to his sunshine, the feminine counterpart to her masculine brother. The sexual dimorphism in her breed was basically a difference in height and an abundance of fluff, and as they stood together beneath the summer moon, it was evident that his fur was longer, thicker about his neck and shoulders, but their builds were quite similar: willowy and long-limbed, slender and square.

Coelacanth basked in the joy of Amoxtli’s smile, her own inky tail sweeping the air with an answering excitement; she set forth with a will, keeping him closely in her sights. Although the siblings were accustomed to exploring on their own, being in a new place without a “home base” aroused their natural shepherd dog inclination for anxiousness. She no more than he wished to be separated for any great period of time as they adjusted to these famine-crippled wilds.

Burrowing her nose in a patch of sand that seemed overturned, as though it had been dug up or buried recently, the ocean-eyed sheepwolf leapt nimbly backwards with a sudden toneless yelp. Her jaws snapped as she barked indignantly at the pile, having scared herself a good deal — in the small hole was a natural sculpture formed from the entwined skeletons of a starfish and a conch. Most likely, one had been attempting to devour the other when they’d been pulled by the sea by some hapless creature and dropped somewhere in the salt flat — preserving the battle forever in a display that was both beautiful and fearsome. The ruddy skeleton of the sea star, garish against the pearly cream, pink, and white of the conch, made it impossible to tell who had been eating whom.

Whatever the answer was — who was eating who, the conch or the starfish? — Coelacanth turned a petulant seablue gaze on her brother. Though both creatures were dead, their bodies preserved and dehydrated by the salt, she was too unnerved to dip her muzzle back into the hole.

Comforted immediately by Amoxtli’s nearness, Coelacanth turned her face to burrow into the thickness of his ruff — thicker and more luxuriant than hers, as was befitting the sexual dimorphism of their ancestors — and allowed herself to be distracted as he led her away, toward a den where they could rest their weary paws.