Wolf RPG

His sense of direction, while ordinarily quite impeccable, proved insufficient when he exited the deep hundred mile wood on its eastern edge. Having thought himself traveling south, the swarthy wolf did a double take when he reached the sparse edge of it and saw that it continued on for several miles south beyond his position. Taking several long moments to orient himself, Prophet dipped his sternum to the floor and stretched with a mighty yawn, following it up with a quick, brisk shake.

Fluid strides carried him from the edge of the woods across a field, perhaps forty wolf-lengths across if he had cared to count, that was covered in a thin dusting of snow. He could smell beneath it the dead, brittle scent of autumnal grass, and also the edgier metal tang of stone, suggesting the terrain here was a curious amalgamation of grassland, wood and rock. He hovered his nose above the ground a moment, inhaling once more, before he lifted his gaze and it stuck on quite the marvel in the near distance.

Propped upon a small hillock was what appeared to be a huge stone split in twain. Ever a curious creature, to which he owed his departure from home, Prophet picked his way toward it with limber strides.

The dark woman considers going down to the river to mark again but she decides against it. It's risky enough to leave her scent behind on a territory she doesn't claim on her own as a warning to those below her. What little knowledge she has of her southern neighbors, she has little knowledge about the wolves congregating to her north. She frequently visits the bracken woods when she gets the chance, searching for remnants of those that might have followed even weeks—months—later.

Scents fill her nose, making her a little uneasy; there hasn't been many wolves at her doorstep lately other than Scythia and offer to the wolf she hunted with not long ago still hangs in the area. None of these remind her of the two but she moves through anyway, a territory that so far isn't enough to have solid borders. The scents don't even register in her process she might be stepping into the unknown.

Thuringwethil spots another up ahead, dark in color, heading toward the same direction she's moving. Her own stride picks up to close the distance, making a large circle outside the strangers peripheral, and she chuffs enough to bring attention to herself.

As he proceeded toward the cracked boulder in the distance, Prophet began to pick up some telltale signs of recent wolf activity, primarily in the smell of the land itself. While there were no solid borders laid, an uneasiness nevertheless crept over him the nearer he drew to the boulder, and not because it was a phenomenon all on its own. His nape prickled uncomfortably and he drew to a halt, placing his paws squarely on the ground and scenting the air. Unmistakeable. There had been wolves in these parts recently, and not just one or two, but several more, and for more than a mere moment. The stamp of their paws across the ground was, for now, immortalized in the scent left behind to waft from the ground like an incense for the noses of other canines.

He licked his lips, succumbing a little to the perfectly natural nervousness of the scent of so many non-familial wolves, and was about to turn away from the boulder and his curiosity both when Thuringwethil triggered a slide of his eyes to the side. She startled him as she circled with a noise in her throat and he couldn't help wondering if she was one of the wolves who was frequenting the area of his curious interest. Ever a reasonable wolf, Prophet pressed his tail and ears closer to his core and shrank in on himself, but the briefest nervous flash of tongue was enough to plainly say, I am no threat if you aren't.

"Yours?" Prophet assumed, his voice scarcely above speaking volume and much steadier than he himself felt as he called out to the female, whose fur was deeper pitch than his and whose shape suggested she was no stranger to defending herself. Luckily for him, Prophet was more of a speaker than a fighter.

Thuringwethil's weight shifts into a stop when she's been spotted but doesn't let her gaze fall anywhere else but the other dark wolf. Her question triggers her to quickly shake her head but it doesn't answer the question bubbling in her mind. The wolf seems to know enough that the location has been used as refuge but not by whom. It isn't likely the scents or marks left behind are his either. Curiosity lingers in the back of her mind still and it is then she breaks away and looks around her.

"I have a pack near here and the scents were concerning when I came by," she explains and then takes a few steps closer to the landmark. Where ever they are, they left enough behind to cause concern. She wonders if the other is scouting it out for himself for one reason or another or if he's taken to passing through. His benefit finding the wolves collaborating here will likely be vastly different than her own goal.

Thuringwethil waived Prophet's assumption that she was the one frequenting this area, an admission that allowed Prophet to relax just slightly. She presumably wouldn't be attacking him for being too close, then. The scent was vaguely familiar but having not spent too much time focusing on Depp when they met, the dark-haired male didn't connect the dots. He recalled Depp only by his invitation, and how bold he had thought it, though boldness wasn't necessarily a bad thing in the northern wolf's eyes.

The concern she admitted drew his interest and curiosity, and he hummed a quiet, "hmm," as if contemplating what next to say. There were many things he could remark upon, such as the fledgling claim, the surrounding lands, or what hers were like, but Prophet wasn't the normal sort of chit-chatter. While he wasn't the solemn, stoic sort who was much too cool to hold conversations with anyone, he did have an unusual aversion to small talk and preferred to break the ice more directly.

"It causes you concern because...?" he led off, genuinely curious what a pack wolf might want with a territory other than the one they guard.

Thuringwethil doesn't have to consider the question long to know the answer: there are too many, too close, to her home. Growing once more in a land not her own settles a different seed of protocol for herself. Stirrings outside Seageda and other clans never went unnoticed but their populous were far greater, her reign reaching much farther than the borders of Drageda could offer. Even the Phoenix wolves were proving to be a headache but her claim had taken root enough that for now, she'll handle it the best way she knows how.

"I need to know if they are a threat," she tells him. The survival of her wolves have been ingrained into her since she'd been chosen as a prospect, training since she could barely walk a straight line on plump, wobbly legs. With her birth place gone, the instincts never disappeared. The young leader carries herself a few feet ahead of her, as if it might give her a few more answers. She glances behind her to the other dark wolf. "What are you doing here?" she asks with a slight quirk of her brow. He may not hold the scents that already linger but that doesn't mean she can wave him off as a non-threat.

"A threat to what?" queried Prophet, who was still unable to grasp the idea that nearness was, in and of itself, threatening. His birth pack had been directly next to two others, and aside from the occasional spat where the claims overlapped, there was never blood shed over such a trivial matter as space. So long as they were careful, the wolves could even cross unimpeded over another's territory when the pack was on the opposite side of the claim, something he intuitively knew would not be possible with Thuringwethil.

"Your wolves in combat? Your lands?" He gnawed his tongue momentarily, then teased, "your pride?" But he expected no clear answer to this, though, for it was within a pack wolf's best interest to keep their truths close at heart. "I am merely passing through," he explained in answer to her own question, and added, "I was propositioned by a strange fellow in the woods there, seemed to think I would want to follow a man I've never so much as met. Perhaps you should seek him out. He may know something about who haunts this area."

Even though she's taken a few steps onward, hearing the male question her intentions causes a little ruffle of fur on the back of her neck. Her ears cup forward as she swings her attention back to him, considering the question and whether or not he's serious. Seageda didn't exactly have close neighbors but the others attached did but the understanding between their dynamic had always been a little different. A group of wolves collecting nearby without knowing their intention leaves her unsettled and she'd come, seeking out for herself what is going on.

"Why is it strange to you to find out their intentions?" she decides to ask then, finding it odd. Aggressive wolves settling near her would not be in her favor. Wolves impacting their hunting and survival wouldn't be in her favor. The male eventually opens up on his mission, mentioning another wolf about a pack. It's close enough that it might very well be the same thing associated with her purpose in the bolder. "Did he mention his name?"

She throws back a question and Prophet's lips twitch with a mixture of amusement and confusion alike. "It would not concern me," he informed. "You have land of your own, do you not? Does it not suit and sustain you, that you find the settling of others threatening?" It was the only explanation he could come up with on the fly. As a lone wolf, the affairs of packs didn't concern him and again he expected to go unanswered, particularly due to the dig in his question. As a former pack wolf, he had never been concerned with what others did, so long as they didn't trespass on his territory. To know there were wolves aggressive enough to control even beyond their claim was curious to him indeed.

But he didn't think less of Thuringwethil for it. Her motives were perplexing to the Arctic wolf, whose life had been spent wholly within his pack's borders up until his dispersal, but that didn't make them wrong. Still, he was curious to know—was her land perhaps too barren to support a pack, requiring them to range beyond their threshold for prey? Were they insecure about their claim and required utter control over the surrounding areas to ensure theirs was never contested? There were many possibilities, and as his orange eyes swept over her, he was driven to find out the exact one so he might better understand Thuringwethil herself.

At the last moment, so swept up in his curiosity, he remembered her question. If Depp had introduced himself, Prophet had already forgotten the name, so he rejoined, "unfortunately, no. He was a strange fellow, though."

The male’s response causes a slight tilt of her head but she brushes it off, ears twitching on her head for sounds around her while she considers the questions she is given back. She’d grown up solely in Seageda and for a good majority of her life, isolated from most things while her training took place and precedent over everything else. Protection, survival, belonging to wolves that would ultimately trust her as their leader to keep them safe. A place where battle and war isn’t uncommon and distance from one clan to another is a big deal. 

The Teekon, however, hadn’t proven to be quite so brutal but that doesn’t erase everything beaten and engrained into her mind and it wouldn’t change how she leads her wolves. "If they have intentions of encouraching on my land, I need to know," she decides. Sleeping Dragon may be hers but now that the land north of the river is off limits to the southern pack, she feels partial to the neutral territories surrounding her own and a mental claim of where her wolves are free to roam safely.

Thuringwethil takes a deep breath as he moves on, explaining the wolf did not pass along his name. She nods, just slightly, before looking else where. “Thank you,” is all she manages before she decides to move on.

Prophet rolled his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug, understanding that they would never really understand one another. From what he gathered, Thuringwethil believed in a need for boundaries and buffers between claimed lands while Prophet believed in no such thing. The land a pack chose was sufficient for them as far as he understood. What Thuringwethil saw as necessity for the protection and safety of her territory, Prophet saw as paranoia, but no doubt she would see his tolerance and temperance as a weakness or a fatal flaw if she knew how he felt about nearby packs.

She thanked him and he nodded his head as she parted from him, sparing no further words on their disagreement. He watched her go a moment before he himself headed uphill to inspect the boulder which, as he had suspected, was split in two by some force of nature.