Blackfeather Woods I'll stop wearing black when they make a darker colour

As Ramsay crossed into the mire, he was thankful that winter's chill had frozen the waterways, presenting straight paths that would otherwise be unnavigable. His legs were long enough to carry him through water if needbe, especially now that he was starting to grow with more rapidity than in the first stage of his life, but it was just easier for the growing pup this way. His eyes had fully transitioned to a deep, rich indigo, the same shade as Miraak's, and the fur of his shortened nape and hunched shoulders had veritably exploded into a high ridge of messy, bladed fur in recent weeks. All this combined gave him the look of a miniature Melonii wolf in a hyena-esque body, and to emphasize it, he'd begun to wear a vaguely knowing grin of late when in the company of strangers.

But today he wasn't in anyone's company and his expression was neutral. His pace was even and regular as he wove between the trees, turning on a dime at times to direct his vision to the sides, then continuing on. He had spent very little time on this side of the woods. He knew it was where the spirits congregated. The air felt heavier here; it was due to the marsh's natural humidity and oppressive overgrowth, but to him, religious as he was, it was the heavy burden of ghosts and daedra watching from the trees. Even so, though he believed in them and held them at least semi-sacred, Ramsay did not pray like the priests and didn't worship as strongly as they, and felt vaguely uncomfortable in the mire. This was Maegi's preferred place, and she was the main reason he delved into it in spite of his general unease.

Ramsay is looking for @Maegi but this is open to anyone.

The girl was sitting, head bowed in quiet reflection, near the Altar, when movement near the edge of the swamp caught her eye. It carried a distinct wolf-smell, and was smaller than either Kove or Miraak, which could mean only one thing: it was one of her siblings. Indeed, the form revealed itself to be Ramsay, in all his stunted glory.

One of her ears flicked curiously as she stared, but her mouth nonetheless opened in a lolling smile, genuinely happy to see her brother. Limping toward him a few paces, she stopped and waited for him to come the rest of the way. The only trouble Ramsay had with movement regarded his head and neck; he walked just fine: not perfect, but at least faster than her.

"Ramsay," Maegi greeted. Her voice was beginning to dip slightly, from the squeaky pitch of her girlhood to the sharp yet husky sound it would become. "Why are you here? You never come to the Temple." She surmised he was looking for her, but would wait for her brother to speak for himself.

As expected, Maegi was here. She rose up from the coffin-esque altar, split in twain in the hollow's center, as Ramsay began to clamber down the rocky hill toward her. All the while, the heavy feel of the mire pressed in around him, so when he closed the distance and greeted her with an affectionate shake of his short tail, his eyes held a mildly frantic light to them.

"No," he agreed, turning slowly on the spot to examine the altar beyond Maegi. "Air is heavy here. Many eyes watching. Many eyes judging." Judging him and everyone else, he was sure. Ramsay was devout enough to not feel like he'd done something wrong, but he was all wrong himself, a little gremlin, and everyone thought so even if they didn't say it. Licking his lips thoughtfully, the dwarf twisted his ears back 'round to his sister and, still watching the altar, he stated, "you do not like Cicero as father."

One ear flicked absently as he spoke of the Temple. She had never heard the gods speak ill of Ramsay, not even when she mentioned him directly in her prayers. Unlike Euron, whose optimism toward their deformities irritated her, Ramsay seemed to be keenly aware of his abnormal body. It did not, however, disqualify him from a place here--or so she thought.

"I like Cicero," Maegi countered, mouth drawing downwards in a frown. "But isn't it weird? Potema is his sister. We're not going to have children, ever. It would be weird."

She paused, wondering whether or not she should level the argument that had made Euron leave their conversation so abruptly. She didn't think Ramsay, who seemed more emotional than her other brother, would take it well, either. Nevertheless, it was instrumental in her thoughts, so she opened her mouth, hoping Ramsay would understand.

"Mother even said it was weird," she murmured. "That it shouldn't have happened. And she's mean. . .but she's smart, too." She wouldn't be such a powerful priestess if she wasn't smart.

"Not weird," countered Ramsay, who really had no frame of reference for boundaries or social norms. Blackfeather Woods wasn't the place to grow up if you wanted to live any sort of normal life. He was no exception to that; Ramsay's concept of right and wrong was as twisted as his body by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing, such that having children with his sister seemed like a perfectly acceptable thing to do. Not that he planned to.

She wasn't far off in assuming that Ramsay would have a similar visceral reaction to mention of Potema. Luckily, Ramsay had never seen their mother again, so the pain of her abandonment—and the cold way he had sliced the title cleanly from her in his mind—didn't rattle him as much as it had rattled their brother. "She is no mother," he reminded her coolly, "and she is not smart. You are smart. You should know better."

Potema had alienated her three youngest children to the point of making at least two of them want to kill her, or at least see her dead—that, Ramsay thought, was probably the stupidest thing any mother could ever do. Her lofty position as a priestess meant nothing to him, not like it meant something to Maegi, so he couldn't see past Potema's poor treatment to catch his sister's meaning.

An exasperated huff of air left her nostrils. Was she missing something? Was she in the wrong? Why were Euron and Ramsay so all right with this, when it was clear everyone else was not? Furthermore, her eyes narrowed at his implication that she should know better. After all, it was her knowledge--her gut feeling--that had led her to this conclusion in the first place.

"I hate her," Maegi growled, the pent-up anger rising in her chest once more. "She hates us, too. She said so. But why? Why does she hate us? Don't you wonder why?"

There had to be a reason. Potema herself had given Maegi the reason. It was right in front of their noses; how could Ramsay look blindly past it?

Her voice broke off in the beginnings of a sob, and she swallowed it back, blinking the emotions away before continuing. "It's not about us, Ramsay," she whispered. "Not you or me or Euron. It's about her, and Cicero. Whatever happened before we were born." She sighed, her gaze falling to the ground. "I love Cicero. But something isn't right."

"Don't care about her," Ramsay dismissed with a quiet sigh. He didn't think about Potema. He didn't even care enough to hate her. The passion and verve that Euron and Maegi shared was lacking considerably in him. Besides, he hadn't seen Potema since the day she'd left them alone in the glen. If not for her occasional scent crossing the territory, Ramsay would assume she was dead. The dwarf knew she wasn't, but he didn't trouble herself over her. "Don't care why. Don't need her. Don't want her either."

Though, given a chance, he would separate her throat from her jawline with the cool precision of a callous surgeon.

In his mind, there was no justifiable reason for her actions. Cicero was in the same position as Potema, theoretically, but he paid attention to his offspring, and Ramsay considered him family for it. Potema's decision to separate herself from them was her own choosing. He blamed nothing else. "It's about her," he said simply, "she chose to hate. You choose to be upset about it. Choose not to care instead." It was just easier that way, he thought.

She let out a sigh, but one of sorrow this time, not anger. The dispassion Ramsay displayed was something she'd acquire later in life, but for now, she was an angst-filled girl, with questions constantly dripping from her tongue and plaguing her mind. She didn't understand how he couldn't care. How could he not? About any of this?

"I don't want her," Maegi said firmly, her jaw tight. She shrugged, sitting down on her haunches, the right forepaw, as usual, dangling a few ungainly inches higher than the other planted on the ground. She had hoped that perhaps her crooked leg would right itself as she aged, but it hadn't come to be. She still limped and plodded.

Breathing deep, she tried to let the tension go from her neck and shoulders, instead offering her brother a timid smile. "I haven't seen you in days," Maegi murmured, looking Ramsay over. Like her, he had not grown out of his stunted nature; it seemed even more prominent, actually, as he got older. Nevertheless, he looked well enough; his eyes had turned to indigo, his small face maturing to something you could call handsome, if it wasn't attached to a body with no neck at all.

"How are you? What have you been doing?"

She insisted on not wanting Potema, but Ramsay wasn't convinced yet, nor was he going to push it. Euron cared about Potema's opinion of him as well, and he didn't think less of either his brother or his sister for it. That he couldn't care less about her was a gift that only he seemed to be able to appreciate for now. Eventually, perhaps they would join him in that, and they could put her and her negligence behind them for good.

Until such a time as she bared her throat, that is.

He hadn't realized how much time had passed since he was in his sister's company for more than a few moments. Ramsay spent a lot of his time near the pack fringes of late; when not there, he was in the glen, but Maegi often spent her days on the eastern side of the territory, where the daedra were closer. "Your eyes are different," he noted, only now realizing for the first time that they didn't match one another. They were like Euron's that way, but different as well, uniquely Maegi. Ramsay, save for his squashed physique, was nothing individual or unique, but he would one day be proud to wear the Melonii colours.

"Been at the borders, and learning to stalk," said Ramsay, though mostly it was the former. The latter was more of a personal game that he only did when he wanted to try to be like Euron. "War is coming," he informed her offhandedly, but surely their gods had told her of that. They spoke only to her of their litter. "What have you been doing?" he echoed back, tilting his head childishly.

"So are yours," Maegi observed, smiling a little wider as the weight on her heart eased. Conversations about their mother brought her all the angst in the world, and she was more than happy to shake them off as soon as she could. "They're darker. They look like Miraak's."

War is coming. She knew already, though she had heard from Vaati, not from any sort of divine message. The thought of it sent a shiver down her spine, but Ramsay looked cool, almost nonplussed, by the coming storm. A warrior born, for sure. His destiny was on the battlefield, she was sure of it. As for hers. . .

"I'm here a lot," she responded, nodding toward the Altar. "Miraak and Kove are teaching me lessons. Prayers, Daedric. Cicero taught me a little bit about poisons. I'm just learning." That was as good a summary as any--just learning. If she were a human child, Maegi would have been a voracious reader; as it was, she clung to her teachers' every word.

Her ears pricked in curious inquiry; she wanted to hear more about the world outside their Woods. "What are the borders like?" Maegi asked. "I never go. What's it like out there?"

D'you mind if we fade this out or conclude it soon? :D Just trying to scrub out my threadlog but I'm cool with continuing if you prefer.

"Hm," mused Ramsay. He didn't know Miraak very well and couldn't even remember what the man's eyes looked like, but he was glad to know that he took after his relatives. It provided Ramsay with certain advantages, or so he thought. As for Maegi's eyes, he didn't really have the words to describe them. One bright and sunny, like the outside world; one deep and gloomy, like the woods. If he had been a prophetic sort or inclined toward the same lessons as Maegi was, he might have thought she was destined to live with one foot in and one foot out of woods.

He nodded as best he could when she described her usual pastimes. Things he wasn't really interested in. He had learned about the daedra both significant and insignificant as a necessity, but the rest of it he felt didn't apply to him. No one wanted prayers from a stunted dwarf, and their secret language didn't interest him. If nothing else, Ramsay was happy to leave mastery of those subjects to his beloved sister. His calling was elsewhere.

"Outsiders steal our skulls," he said with a faint frown. "Skulls are dumb. They draw attention." With a flicker of his short tail, the boy licked his lips and asked, "did Euron tell you about the wolf who attacked?" as a precursor to telling the story himself.

Skulls? Maegi rolled her scrawny shoulders in a bewildered shrug, listening to Ramsay speak. It occurred to her that she hadn't been close enough to the borders to even see the things her brother spoke of. She had isolated herself, hid within the depths of the forest and all the sights it had to offer.

When had she withdrawn so much? How had she spent so much time apart from her brothers that she barely knew what they saw, what they did? She at one time had considered them inseparable, but their fate had been written when she had not caught the same eagerness her brothers had to scale the walls of the Glen. They voyaged out, and she stayed in.

Thinking. Learning. Absorbing. Not to say Ramsay and Euron hadn't been doing just that. But their lessons were fundamentally different, and now they were different wolves because of it. Their quests would serve them well, rounding them out as individuals.

While Maegi would remain, pious and silent, a fanatic to her religion and scarcely anything else.

"No," she answered Ramsay's question, shaking her head with a small smile. "Tell me."

"Euron claimed a skull near the borders," he began, and launched into the story of Berúthiel threatening the two of them on the borders. It was the first, but not the last, time that Ramsay had realized that the skulls served two purposes. To the cult, they served as warnings to the outside world; to the hungry outside world, they were nothing more than free food. His judgment on the manner would only continue to grow, but it was only a tickle in the back of his mind as he recounted to Maegi the events of that day.