Totoka River you can be an angel of mercy

Wary and watchful at first, the little Groenendael tilted her finely-sculpted head in utter puzzlement as the regal wanderer made himself small before her — a colossal feat given the marked difference in their heights — and sharply averted his powder blue eyes. So dissociated was she from his show of submission that she turned her head swiftly to look over one ink-feathered shoulder, agile hindquarters dancing in a deft, automatic semicircle to bring her parallel with him as her own carriage dipped and her sleek topline formed a graceful tilde. Tufted ears swept back to hug her crown as her soft pink tongue darted nervously forth to lap at the tip of her nose — but her Neptune eyes were quizzical as she took in the empty landscape. What had he seen to cow him so? Turning to him with a shy flutter of her sumi-e brush tail, “There is nothing to fear,” she crooned to him comfortingly, in a low, undulating whine. In her haste to banish his fear, she forgot her own.

“I — I am yours to command,” he told her then, and Coelacanth tilted her head to the other side, wondering in her doggish way whether she would be able to find sense in his nonsensicality from this angle. She concluded that he had mistaken her for someone or something more important than herself — a mere sheepdog without a flock, a mere wolf without a pack — and shimmied nearer to him, stretching out on her torso beside him in the snow. With a vehement shake of her head she denied both his fealty and his offer to leave; he was warm and solid and real and he spoke so kindly — and she was so lonely! — and although he lacked the otherworldly command of Doe’s Leviathan or the Haloisi Kjalarr, he bore a magnetism all his own.

A glimmer of what she’d felt upon meeting Marbas, Doe, and Kierkegaard for the first time — the unfettered, unabashed hope and heedless trust that characterized the inky ingénue — strummed the wounded sheepdog’s heartstrings at Thexxan’s nearness; she looked to him now to soothe aches to which she could place no name. Craning her graceful neck, she scooped snow onto the bridge of her nose and deposited it in a miniscule hillock at the male’s forepaw, whuffing softly to topple it and allow it to spill across his toes. In an extension of that motion, she tipped her finely-sculpted head so her cheek was pillowed upon the glimmering white, seabright eyes looking bashfully up at him with a luminous plea: please do not leave me.