Northstar Vale tea leaves

@Dusty Rose whenever! <3

epoch had never named the third and fourth lakes. tamar visited each as night crept over the vale. the third lake was a sprawl of grey sand and shallow edges where turtles clustered.

the fourth lake was punctuated by boulders lifting from the current. she leapt to one and then another, the moon shining twice, once in the sky, once below upon the surface of the water.

another jutting stone, another, another, until she lightly bounded back the way she had come,  a streak of golden red whisking from one rock to the next.

They stayed nearby one another, much of the time. Even now, Dusty Rose was within singing distance of his companion. This new reliance was as uncomfortable as every other step had been, but somehow, the coywolf could not stop himself from walking the path anyway.

And look — he was acclimating. He was realizing he'd put up with quite a bit of it made Reverie happy.

He was realizing that quite a bit of it made him happy.

So he was in a good mood as he made his careful way down the ridge and into the valley below. It meant that his tail wheeled instead of bristling when he saw a darting figure not far below. Without thinking, he tipped back his head to sing a warbling hello.

the sound stilled tamar.

she paused in reaching for the next stone again, soft ears lifted in curiosity. pale gaze searched and she found the shades of him next.

it was not a sound she was used to making. a rejoinder rose in her throat all the same; thrumming; and she sang back!

the golden tail waved, telegraphing her curiosity but tamar did not approach.

When the returning song was friendly, the coywolf thought nothing of closing the distance between them. There was a whisper of instinct telling him to chase off this contender, female or no — but either his wolf blood was too strong or his bond with Reverie was too weak. He couldn't bring himself to see any threat in her. Especially not once he was close enough to see their similarities.

"Hey," he chirped, liquid blue eyes bright an inquisitive. "You don't look like you're from around here. Not anymore than me, I mean."

Was she from the Red Desert, too? Dusty Rose doubted it, but he wanted to know more about her either way.

"My name's Dusty Rose," he added, remembering his manners.

he was pretty.

perhaps more than that, an intrinsic pull toward one who resembled her. the swanwater depths of his sunny blue eyes did little to quell the initial sensation. 

reminding herself that she was only battling insecurity in these times, the desertine offered a small smile of welcome. "i am tamar."

she did not offer her surname; she did not know why. "and i am not from this place. but i have come to love it."

Tamar. 

Pretty, the coywolf thought. He tucked the name away in the back of his mind the way he tucked colorful feathers into Reverie's hollow. 

When he looked at her, he couldn't help seeing her mixed heritage before anything else. No one likes coywolves (except Dusty was beginning to think this wasn't always true) and she was very obviously a coywolf. He wondered what sort of discrimination she'd faced, and then wondered what sort of creature these things had made her into. She seemed sweet, to him. Soft.

He danced closer, his tail still wheeling at his hocks. The way he looked at her, though — not unpleasantly, for he did not intend to have an unpleasant time. But it was the way he looked at a rabbit when he wasn't hungry enough to hunt. The way that he sometimes looked at Reverie's daughters — with interest, with curious intent, with the knowledge that it was not polite to bite them but without any of the natural inhibition that stopped others from doing so.

Dusty Rose did not lunge for the woman yet. He thought he might want to play. Tamar was too big to play with without her cooperation.

"You've got people here?" he asked her, circling her to try and get a better look. He hadn't seen another coywolf since he'd left his own family behind. It was nostalgic to look upon her. It was uncanny.

he was nothing like a wolf.

tamar, who had not thought of herself as unwolf in a very long while, now saw herself through the deep intrigue in those azurite eyes; the set of her own jaw, the largeness of her ears, the way flank and femur and shoulder, even down to the bounce of his tailtip was different, and thus she was also.

"a daughter," tamar murmured quietly, unsure whether or not she would return to find arsenio still waiting for her on the plateau. for a moment her pale eyes were transfixed with a splendid hurt, and then she was reflective again, warming.

it had been a long time since anyone had watched her so avidly. that he was pleasant to the eye provided a honeyed nature to their meeting. but more than either of these things, tamar found herself amused. "what about you?"