Wolf RPG

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The young dragon threads his way along a jagged strip of rock, tongue caught fixedly between his teeth and one brown butter eye squeezed shut. He’s working on surefootedness today, learning how to keep a steady center of balance even when navigating unsteady terrain, and it isn’t going quite as well as he wants it to. His obsessive desire to be better — to be Drakru — has made a perfectionist of him, and, “‘Enough’ is an illusion,” has become his mantra. The one thing he knows how to train on his own is his body — strength, agility, vitality, and dexterity — and he uses his environment wisely, working with and against it to hone each skill individually.

With his renewed resolve and newfound confidence comes a modicum of regret: in his grief and confusion, he’s postponed seeking out @Antumbra to welcome her back into their home and into his life. (He tells himself that he was just trying to give her space and time to settle in, but deep down, he knows he’s lying.)

A week after that sullen boy slipped unnoticed into the shadows, dithering on the outskirts of pack life, he steps into a patch of chancy sunlight — the weather has been growing colder and damper in a crackling, aching way he can feel deep in his bones — and tips back his head, singing for his nomi. It’s more of a courtesy call than anything else; he’s asking permission to approach, ambling along with his nose to the cool earth, for he isn’t quite confident enough to ask her to come to him.
The sun is high in the sky but blocked by clouds, docking the day by a few degrees. Spending her time in the north helped procure a cost thick for winter but the chill still bites in places she feels it (or rather, doesn’t feel it) most: the tips of her ears, her toes, and the wiggle of her nose. I didn’t mean to make this rhyme.

@Tirgatao is laying with her, some few feet away. They had been talking, mostly about a Trigeda and the wolves still there but have grown into a comfortable silence. When the query goes up, Antumbra doesn’t have to say anything and Tirgatao stands, offers a goodbye, and leaves. Antumbra doesn’t move at first watching her disappear, before howling back for Silkie to find her.
The rhyme was cute. [boops your snoot]

I am going off of Silkie’s threadlog history in this post, so I hope this makes sense!

Nomi’s answering cry spurs Silkie forward, and he approaches her with equal measures of eagerness and apprehension. Without preamble, Nomi,” he murmurs tightly, following it up with a cautious correction: Heda.” In this moment, he isn’t sure whose face he sees, and the words clot and curdle in his throat. “Am I like her?” he demands finally, voice cracking weakly. “Am I natrona?” He, too, had turned his back on his family and snuck off without permission, and though his intentions had been mostly good — to search on his own, so at the very least say he could say he’d tried to find Rorqual and bring her home — in the end his search had been fruitless, and his relationship with @Tux had suffered because of it.

By now, Silkie assumes his foray into the wilds is old news and common knowledge, but he doesn’t know if anybody has expressly told Antumbra about it — so he stands up straight and confesses. “I went out alone to try to find Bat,” he recites, his voice tight and thick with emotions that he’s still learning how to manage and weather. He looks down at the fresh wound across his paw with a furrowed brow. “I — ” He doesn’t really want to admit it, but he presses on, a rumble of disappointment making his tone guttural: “I lost a fight and got sick, and when Mallaidh brought me home, I growled at Kiwi.”

His throat works spasmodically. “I saw you come home, but I was ashamed,” he says, and now he can’t look at her at all. His bourbon-brown eyes are pinned to the wound on his paw and glaze with childish tears he tries furious to blink away. “I didn’t want you to see me. I don’t want to be like her,” wrenches itself from between his tightly clenched jaws, and he hates that his next thought (the one he doesn’t say out loud, because that might make it real) is,

I miss her.
In the time it takes for Silkie to arrive, Antumbra stands and shakes out her fur, stretches a little and straightens herself out. She does not know what to expect without having seen him since her arrival. A glimpse of white, or a miss of his scent; it did not take her long to figure out maybe he hadn’t wanted to be found.

When he arrives, she blinks back her surprise. He looks more like his sire than she expected to see. If it wasn’t for the worried expression across his face, he’d be a splitting imagine.

“What makes you think that?” she asks, “and who is Mallaidh?” She had been focused on something else when Blixen told her.

She’d only been told a little about the situation but he was home and better now, but worry still has etched itself in as scars. “There is nothing for you to be ashamed of,” she adds and steps forward. A sweep of her nose and she lifts his chin. “You’ve learned. And you’re here,” she assures him, leaning in slightly to press her muzzle to his.
Going by the threadlog, Silkie has only known Mallaidh as Mallaidh. I’m acting as though he’s been very withdrawn and inwardly focused since coming home, so the particulars of Mallaidh and Blixen’s relationship are unbeknownst to him. ♥

There is a lump in his throat that is hard to swallow down or speak through, but after a strangled first attempt, “Mallaidh is gona,” Silkie answers. He offers a brief description of her appearance — misty green eyes and a striking pelt that sets her apart from every other wolf Silkie has known — and gulps audibly when Antumbra opens her mouth to speak. “There is nothing for you to be ashamed of,” she tells him, and before he can think of anything to say or do, she closes the distance and lifts his chin with a sweep of her muzzle. “You’ve learned. And you’re here.”

It’s the physical contact that shatters his resolve.

He’s been so good about keeping everything tightly contained, letting out his emotions in cool, controlled bursts — but behind the fiercely stoic façade, far beneath the steely framework of muscle and bone, there’s a worried young wolf who desperately wants to please his nomi and doesn’t understand why Wildfire left him. He takes his biological mother’s bid for freedom personally — how can he not? The wayward Redhawk may have believed her hastily sketched farewell was justifiable, even compassionate, but to Silkie, it had come across as the wild canid equivalent of, “I’m getting the hell out of Dodge, and I’m doing it with or without you.”

Silkie hadn’t cried the day Wildfire turned her back on her sons, her daughter, her wife, and her kru. He hadn’t cried when he was lost and hurt and afraid in the wilderness, far from his home. Now, though, with nomi’s scent in his lungs and her whiskers prickling ticklishly against his cheek; with that painful, yawning emptiness ripping a wide hole in his chest… “I am taller,” he observes brokenly, and this is the last straw: the sudden, irrevocable realization that he didn’t have to tiptoe to achieve this kind of closeness. Can he even call her nomi at this age? He’s ashamed at the burning, prickling feeling that stings his bourbon brown eyes. He feels like the period of leniency for open grief is long past, but his body just won’t listen.

“Nomi,” he forces between his tightly clenched teeth. “Ai hod yu in.”
It takes a few seconds once Silkie has explained Mallaidh’s rank but she can piece together. Furi, maybe. Blixen had said something but she’d been distracted by the notion all together to really absorb it. Antumbra doesn’t say anything and nods her head slightly and doesn’t say anything about it.

Seeing the cracks come loose on his face, Antumbra’s ears fall back. Should she have taken all her children with her? Her entire family? Trigeda could have kept them safe in hindsight, but at the time she didn’t know what she was up against. Their children had been so young, at the time. They were not ready to face what they would have gone through. Maybe if she had, they’d still be together, but she did what was best for them, regardless of how they saw it.

She’d tear Wildfire limb from limb the next time she sees her; for her own pain but that she has caused among their offspring, for tempting fate with Kiwi. Death would be too kind a punishment.

She rattles the thoughts of her mind as Silkie calls to her. I love you. She closes her eyes and murmurs the same, leaning a bit into him before nudging him to come along and follow. They have much to catch up on.