Neverwinter Forest on a black throne reigns upright

This post is clunky. ><;

Also, Cypress is being a big baby.

“You’re the first one I’ve told about this.”

Secrets. Cypress had a few of his own and knew well the importance of keeping them. Normally he didn’t find it difficult — his thoughts flashed guiltily to his last conversation with Rannoch, then jackrabbited to the mountain princess — for although he had inherited his mother’s loquaciousness, he was composed in equal measure of his father’s calm stoicism. “I won’t say anything,” he reassured the dumbstruck O’Malley boy, butting the bridge of his muzzle against the underside of Rian’s lower jaw out of a desire to bolster and encourage more than an inclination to submit. “You’re not crazy, Rian.”

Rian wasn’t — but maybe Cypress was.

His focus turned inward as he considered what he perceived to be his options. Leaving with Rian wasn’t something he’d planned on; he wasn’t even sure whether he truly wanted to, or whether the temptation to escape was just too good to pass up. It was a body versus mind thing all over again. When he thought about leaving, the excitement he felt was tempered by a feeling of insurmountable heaviness that turned his paws and legs to stone; and when the desire to wander began to itch at him, manifesting as a physical need that spurred him into wandering, his mind stubbornly forced upon him the notion that leaving Neverwinter Forest meant abandoning his family. “Kjalarr — he was my paw’s adopted son,” he mentioned, seemingly out of the blue. “When he became a leader with your mama, I felt like that was okay.” His lantern yellow eyes settled self-consciously on the tips of his muddy toes. Like most teenagers, he didn’t want his opinion to differ from his peers — especially one he respected and liked — so he voiced it with hesitation, his tail taking up an anxious whisking as his tall ears flattened. To defend his point — even though Rian hadn’t give him any guff for it in the first place — the raven added, “It was better’n Shrike.”

He drew a slow breath, pulling the air between his clenched teeth. “It’s different with Ondine,” he said, his voice barely bigger than a whisper. “I can’t watch her stand where my mama used to be. I won’t come when she calls.” Willful insubordination wasn’t a vice Cypress was predisposed to possess, but he’d arrived at it organically enough. Quite the opposite, he’d always nurtured a natural proclivity for filial obedience that extended not only to his parents but to his aunt, uncle, cousins, and even wolves like Shrike and Kjalarr, who were close friends or relations of his immediate family. Ondine and Arrille, though, were relations of relations — their degree of separation from Cypress was greater and his bond with them was largely nonexistent — and while he was willing to work harmoniously with them as pack wolves, the idea of one of them leading him was just this side of intolerable. “Until we go,” he uttered staunchly, “I’m going to live here.” He motioned to the morass with a quirk of his muzzle. It wasn’t much to look at, especially given the trees he’d destroyed and the smooth surface of ice he’d demolished.

“Watch, Rian,” he said suddenly, his deepening baritenor contrasting with the dying shadow of the little boy who still desperately wanted to impress his older cousin. Cypress veered away from the jade-eyed O’Malley boy and found a patch of ice that hadn’t been punched through yet. Rearing onto his hind legs, he stiffened his forelegs and punched through it with a satisfying crunch. “D’you wanna try?”