Wheeling Gull Isle the lonely sea and the sky

As always, it is the talking that draws Coelacanth’s attention. Her muscles leap beneath her fur in a nervous ripple at the first syllable out of the green-eyed girl’s mouth, but she settles almost immediately thereafter and blows out a soft breath, a fine spray springing from the expulsion of air from her nose and lips. Neptune eyes search the young wolf’s face, then immediately dart about the clearing to check the shadows for other faces — but the certainty that they are alone for now seems to put the ink-feathered creature at ease.

The girl makes mention of Coelacanth’s wounds — not verbally, but with the pinpoint sway of her black-glistening nose — and at first the skeletal wraith does not understand. The pain; the fever-heat; the smell of infection — these things have become part of her existence for such a prolonged time that she has simply come to accept them. She turns, slim jaws parting sharply on a yelp that is little more than a quick rush of air at the stab of discomfort, but the worst of the wounds are located just out of reach. The words of the speckled girl come back to her in a burst of memory that she is helpless to dispel, and she is filled with shame:

“Make sure you wash our scent off of you as soon as you can — we are not wanted by many. At least you cannot speak of all you have seen here. Get to a healer for your wounds — try to scavenge or even hunt. Go somewhere far, far away from here.”

The scent, she is certain, will never come off — because she can still smell it. It’s still there, in the pores of her skin. Suddenly agitated by its perceived resurgence, she tosses Cascada a look of wrenching desperation. “I can help you,” she’d said, and Coelacanth latches onto that promise with abrupt ferocity. She’ll die, otherwise. They will find her, come for her, drag her back to the Wolfskull and laugh at her. The little wolfdog lowers herself to the ground, crawling on her belly in the rain to stop a few feet away from the green-eyed caretaker, and for a moment merely looks up at the girl with lonely cerulean eyes.

Then, deliberately, she turns her head and rests her chin upon the muddy earth, her shoulder and nape bared to the honey-and-cinnamon female. Catlike paws come up to drape themselves over the bridge of her streamlined muzzle, and she looks pleadingly at Cascada from this vantage point. “I will not bite you. I am a good dog,” says this posture and the frail little flicker of her tail, the soft fold of her tufted ears and the slightly lifted left hind leg that is prelude to the displaying of her sodden undercarriage in submission.