Redsand Canyon did he go on down the mountainside, and leave you all alone?

AW!

Riley had missed the turmoil at the borders, though as he passed through the red keep, he caught the scent of several unknown to him.

He was not a motivated beast, and so, coursed the sundry scents with a sluggish yet persistent interest. Whatever had happened here, had transpired while he was gone. Riley nosed the deep impressions of paws with curiousity, noticing one was as broad (if not broader) than Donovan's, and was rife with hale testosterone.

Placing his paw within the pawprint with slow fascination, Riley observed how slimmed and neat his paws appeared, dwarfed by the monolith order that seemed to reside over these plains.

hope its ok i pop in here!

As always, he carried with him an excess of metaphorical baggage. Many of them were tagged with labels like curiosity and grief and insanity defense. Nemisis's relationship with Donovan was as foreign and obvious as a Martian volcano. It's vast mouth spewed black smoke. It choked him. The ash turned up in his food, in his mouth, in the water he drank. 

The smells are thick and overlapping-- they exude the distinctive warmth that a body leaves on the bed after they wake up. A wrinkled mattress, still bowed in from whoever's weight. Donovan. Nemisis. The vague, dark scent of strangers. And most of all, confrontation. He wasn't surprised. He suspected that Nemisis saw a gun barrel that was smoking more often than it wasn't.

They are two shadows on the red sand, one taller and lighter than the other. He kneels, one hand on a footprint, with the same solemnness of someone righting a tipped-over gravestone; not so much a practical task but a personal one. A state of being.

OFC! thank you for joining <3

Before long, Riley was joined -- by a wolf who seemed to tow a thousand invisible anchors behind him. Even Riley, not known for his astute demeanor, could tell this wolf harbored invisible shackles; his crocodilian eyes (with the one glaringly offset) panned curiously over the man, slowly measuring him.

One of Dovonan's creatures, by the scant scent of comingling that hung on his coat. Riley carefully removed his paw from the crater, placing it in slothlike movement several inches away. It was a while yet before he spoke, though his tone seemed free of any inner malevolence.

"Hi." Simple. Monosyllabic. Possibly unintelligent.

The mismatched gaze observes him. A boy, hard and heavy-set, the consummate loner. On the surface there should've been, might've been, a handsome smile, but what's there is nothing but an intense blank. The head moves, the chest rises and falls with each breath, but the eyes are ever-fixed.

A long and viscous pause. Hi. And as if for a moment, all social structure and ettiquette has left him, Colin nods, mute.

He catches himself. "Hello." Simple. Disyllabic. Patient.

"What is your name?" He grinds his heel into the footprint, ruining the shape. It looks just like any old puncture wound in the ground, now. 

Riley's gaze flickered to the man's paw; had he been doing the same thing?

Surely, it was unhealthy to measure oneself to giants -- all the same, Riley felt somewhat embittered he was so small compared to the many leviathans that roamed the red keep. He blinked slowly as the pale-splattered wolf said hello in return, following up with an inquiry on his name.

"Riley." Came the answer, for once almost quick. "Yours?"

Riley. Yours? 

"Colin." A pause. "Forster." Something reptilian about the blink-- the cold and deliberate swipe of an eyelid going sideways. 

Sentence fragments, the vague outlines of words, they float in his head just out of reach. "How did you get here?" More breath than actual vocalisation, a question so thin you could see through it, like spun tulle. He, Riley, still so young. Colin almost can't bear to look at him. This is what Theo would've looked like if he-- if he was alive. Complete with the dark hair and off-kilter gaze. Complete with the black bitterness. His gift from God, gone, buried so many miles away from home.

He tears his gaze away and swallows, but there is no relief.

Riley might have caught that familiar shade of grief that passed Colin's face, if he had continued to study the white-streaked countenance of his company. His gaze had slid south, tracking the buzzing ascent of a winding bee as it droned to some distant destination -- not here.

He wondered if he should have supplied his last name. It was too late, the moment gone - he worked his tongue, troubled with the complexity of the man's question. Troubled by the complexity of his answer. Anyone with social skill would say, well it's a long story -- and then they'd launch into a cavalier tale.. but Riley found himself fumbling constantly over his words, and instead supplied the very locquacious dull-and-quick-of-it answer: "Donovan found me." Which was not exactly untrue. "You?"

Oh, Riley's company was scintillating, really.

At Riley's artless answer, Colin allows himself to show an imperceptible sigh of relief. After Finley's scrutiny and Derg's casual mention of sparring, its almost reassuring to know that Riley, like him, had simply been found.

He lets the thought spool and unspool inside his skull.

"Me too." Then, "So you weren't looking for anything. Or guided by... anything." The intonation is awkward-- Colin blindly shoots at something between a question and an assumption, two things both contradictory by nature. Neither of them were skilled orators, nor particularly perceptive of body language. Like laborers at the Tower of Babel's base, they skim by meaning and understanding but never actually touch it.

Artless indeed. Everything about Riley was artless and sometimes violent. From his conception, to his birth, to his meager and drawn out existence where he wandered like a loveless and dispersed medicant with no wares to be had.

He blinked owlishly at the question which, the more he listened, the more he thought it was not a question at all. Did it end in the subtle tonal uptick normal with questions? Riley didn't think so. Was it rhetoric? Could he even tell?

Much like those that gazed up at any feat of work (be it the tower of Babel or otherwise), Riley entirely missed the point. At length he blurted: "What do you mean, guided? By what?"

It never even occurred to Riley that some wolves followed a logic that he did not. That some wolves believed in the importance of fate, or stars, or even gods -- that some wolves did not lead a loveless, artless life.

I mean, if you want things. Again, his voice is inflectionless. It is so close to being a fully-formed question, and without the uptick, it seems comically downturned. Someone you want to stay with, somewhere you want to go...a god to worship.

He looks over at Riley again when he feels he's ready to. The imagined knife in his torso, it twists.

Nothing behind the eyes. He feels foolish for even suggesting the possiblity of wanting. There were boys that came straight out of the womb with sailor caps or a telescope already set far beyond an electric horizon, filled to the brim with juvenile but ultimately pointless hopes and dreams-- and then there were boys like Riley, moribund. 

Dementia patients had more pipe dreams than he would ever hope to have (provided that hope was in his limited arsenal of neurological chemicals.)

Indeed; there were boys that tumbled from the womb with stars in their eyes, great destinies to actualize -- but if Riley had any inward dreams or passions, he had yet to uncover them. His fate was no coursing river - it was a flat and phlegmatic lake; dark in the middle, and without a ripple to be seen.

He was oblivious to Colin's accurate assessment of him, for he was still stuck on guiding -- who? His brow furrowed at the mention of worship. Colin had Riley for the briefest moment when he had mentioned someone you want to stay with, but now that connection was fading away and the tether was severed. "Worshipping is stupid." Riley responded, the utter dismissal in his tone very much a callback to his headstrong mother.

If there was any perfect opposite to childhood innocence, it would not so much be violent depravity than the inversion he saw here. 

Then again, there was a candidness in his answer he found difficult to deny. The flat absence of guile is almost reassuring. Riley seemed utterly immutable and wasn't that enough, to have that one constant in a life? Maybe it is. He concedes. But there's nothing stopping you.

He doesn't pretend as if he can get through to him. He's tried his best his whole life to mince everything down into dystopian little cubes, but this is where he can give up on trying. It can help, whenever you are lonely. Doesn't it get old, being lonely. 

As if on cue, a hot wind wails through the canyon. It's gone as soon as it appears.

Riley's logic came in absolutes. There were no shades of gray in Riley's world: things were black, or they were white. They were good, or they were bad. Empty, or full of promise.. Intelligent, or incredibly stupid..

His ear flicked back as a summer squall clawed its way through the canyon. Somewhere distantly a dirt devil spun into existence, fanning out in grating screams in some far-away gorge.

"Are you lonely?" It is perhaps the first inkling of some observation in the ophidic boy: he cocked his head to the side, birdlike in his curious studying of Colin's face.

Though he doesn't have to think much to provide the answer, Colin lets the silence linger. Yes. There was not much point in lying. You?

He wonders what Riley saw in his face-- would it be the furrow splitting his forehead in half, which Ruth would constantly try and rub out to no avail? His greying hair? The scar on his lip? Or were faces simply another object to him, something without hiatus or nuance that just happened to move and convey an apocryphal language? There were many questions, and Riley was, to put it lightly, not a generous giver of answers.

Whatever Riley saw in the reflective pool of Colin's knitted face, he did not verbalize it. The lull of silence that stretched between them was familiar, until a bald reply was given in answer.

Yes.

Riley could not say he sympathized. Instead, clueless to the yokel of sorrow that hung around Colin like a torc, Riley simply asked: "Why?" Did he not have company, in the sense of a pack and the Saints?

Was that not enough?

This time, he is quiet out of necessity. He rolls words around in his head until they all sound the same, worn down to their phonemic roots like river stones. I had someone I wanted to stay with. And now she's gone. He explains patiently, with the same methodical and lacklustre tone of a math teacher at his chalkboard, traces of long division on the green.

He thinks to say, there are places where a pack just can't fill, but it's too abstract, too evasive. Too smoke-and-mirrors.

He notices far too late that Riley had dodged his question, but doesn't chase after it. Why go down a tunnel when you're not sure that there even is an end?

OOPS! Riley's author may be as dumb as her character, forgetting to address Colin's question. Let's chalk it up to Riley's lack of focus.

He digested the news about a woman in Colin's life. And her being gone made him lonely? He wondered if Colin felt the same alien feeling that he did, when he thought of Esme. Did that mean he would be like Colin when enough years had passed?

"Where did she go?" Riley dodged every contextual clue like my bowling balls dodge literally every fucking pin any time I bowl. Maybe this lady hadn't gone anywhere but the dirt -- not that Riley was introspective enough to catch that.

Again, the abrupt honesty of his questions. He frowns thoughtfully at the minimalism. She just left. She.... What? Thinks that I killed our son? ...didn't want to be with me anymore.

His frown darkens. I don't know where she is now. Most likely happier than him, though he can't muster up any bitterness for that. It felt like a lifetime ago, now. Grieving put every thought into a funhouse mirror, even the feeling of time. He would wake up and expect her to be there beside him but at other times, like this, he was a few moments before forgetting her name--

Ruth. Her name is Ruth. And she had blonde hair, and she was angry more often than not, but in a different way from me. And she'll never forget me, but not in the way I'd hoped to it to be.

Oh. That kind of gone.

Riley knew a thing or two about being unwanted. Hello, his mother?? Had she ever even loved her children? So he had walked, and like Ruth, Riley had stayed gone.

Even with the shared heartbreak, Riley's reaction when it came chugging into port woefully slowly, was also woefully tactless.

"She sounds like a bitch." Well, in his defense, all he knew was she had left a perfectly capable man, and for what? He delivered the statement with unflinching honesty, trusting his assessment was right and not even remotely aware it could possibly hurt Colin further.

we can fade here unless riley wants to ask more questions or smth ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ty for the thread! twas fun :D

Colin wasn't sure what he had expected. Not comfort, not any strain of sentimentality. Most likely silence, or a grunt that fell in line with the rest of his brutalist architexture. 

A bitch. Some small part of him-- once microscopic, now noticeable-- is tempted to agree. It is crude, spiteful, ugly. He's dismayed at this part of himself, and stamps it down, buries it deep. His haggard eyes find Riley's. No expression on his face, other than a slight tension in his lips, on the verge of saying something and then changing his mind.

With that, he collects himself and leaves to continue his aimless walk around the canyon, as if the conversation had never taken place at all. Only his mangled footprint remains, like someone had put out a massive cigarette in a red ashtray.

<3 that was fun!! new one soon? poor pastor colin

Riley was no black sheep to be corralled into Colin's flock. He was unaware of the man's involvement in the spiritual, and he only knew the simple facts: this man was lonely, because of a woman.

So, naturally, it was all her fault.

Colin might have looked as if he were to say something, but he said nothing at all -- leading Riley to conclude he agreed with his assessment of this 'Ruth' woman, who was clearly a bad news heartbreaker. He gave a shrug of his shoulders confidently, and feeling the man was no longer in the mood to talk (not that they had an invigorating discussion to begin with), Riley sniffed watched as Colin left without a word.