As the long autumn drew closer and closer to winter, Saena continued pursuing her Naturalist apprenticeship. She rose at the crack of dawn every day to watch the sky lighten and tried to analyze the clouds that rolled in. She still guessed wrong a lot of the time—Saena often predicted rain, sleet, and fog just for the day to turn out pleasant—but she was getting better at predicting when the weather truly would be bad. She was aided by her unusual dreams, in which the simorgh version of herself explained the shape and composition of rain clouds, snow clouds, and storm clouds.
When she wasn't watching the sky, Saena was wandering the plateau or its outskirts, taking mental note of the fauna and their behaviour. She'd recently discovered a wily wolverine that hid at the plateau's base. A family of deer mice made their home near the clear spring she'd found with Pura in the summer. The plateau housed several grouchy badgers. The deer were the most interesting; Saena had tracked their progress all the way around the plateau. As a Naturalist, it wasn't her job to count the herd or determine the best place to hunt them; she was to ensure they were in good health, and to report the number of offspring and other behavioural changes.
She dabbled in other things as they came to her in her dreams, but mostly she did what she knew. She hadn't been gossiping as much, but that was more a consequence of there being nothing worth talking about. Tytonidae was still gone, and Pura haunted the plateau like a ghost according to Blue Willow, but Saena hadn't seen him.
Speaking of ghosts, Saena found herself face to face with a small, semi-transparent white bear cub when she rose from her daily weather watching. She froze in place with her hackles prickled into sharp ridges along her back and lifted her lip fearfully. The ethereal cub didn't move or say anything; it continued staring at her with its blank white eyes. She could have swore she saw a ripple of blue in them.
Unwilling to spend any longer in the presence of the terrifying bear cub, Saena turned and began to lope quickly away, thoroughly spooked. Her ears remained twisted back, listening for pursuit, but the cub didn't seem to be following.
it's been a while!
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tytonidae had not been seen for some time, and today the man intended to search for her scent along the edges of the territory. his steps were buoyant, if not for the simple anticipation of his union with blue willow, and the children that would be brought forth from it. one day, one day soon, he would visit peregrine, if only to reaffirm affability between them, while maintaining closure. he would have liked to make love to his panther again, a thousand times, but for their hearts, it was best to insist upon distance.
a flash of multicolored hue caught his eye; taltos spotted saena loping at a relatively fast pace through the territory. a chuff was birthed into the wind, hoping to capture her attention, and the earthen servant turned his steps toward the girl, wondering if she was intending solitude this day or if she would welcome — even tolerate — his presence near her own.
It was sheer luck that every encounter Saena ever had with Taltos began with her doing or saying something crazy. The man's first impression of her had surely been a bad one, given she had openly lied to his face (and he'd known it, she later realized). She'd just loped past him, barely even seeing him for the speed of her trot in an effort to escape the ghost-or-whatever-it-was, when he called out to her in the low baritone manner that wolves often did. Aw, crap, he knows about the bear, was her illogical thought. She stopped suddenly, like hitting a brick wall, and turned somewhat woodenly toward him.
"Hey, Lasher," she said a little too brightly, with a grin plastered on her face that showed a little too much enthusiasm. "Uh... Ain't seen no bears here!" If Lasher's first impression of Saena a few months ago was a bad one, then this one was shaping up to be worse.
lol
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he blinked as saena spoke, glancing past her pale shoulder. i have not scented a bear in some time,
he murmured musingly, but thought little of it. how have you been, saena?
it was important to the man that the children peregrine had left behind remained with wolves whom they could call upon in their times of trouble.
as it was now, the girls and pura did not confide much in him, but taltos hoped to change that. you seemed as if you were rushing somewhere a moment ago. would you care for some company?
the man asked softly, ears cupped forward to measure her answer, wondering at the vaguely mad smile upon her lips.
I haven't scented a bear... said Lasher, and Saena threw back her ears and chuckled a little too quickly. "That's 'cause there aren't any!" she said hastily in a tone that suggested there was, in fact, a bear. It was like a poor charade: Saena trying to tell hin what ailed her without actually telling him, and poor Lasher likely confused out of his mind.
He asked how she was. This was as good a topic as any to latch onto, and she did so fervently. "Great," she chirped, "y'know, not even mad about dad anymore, that dumb slut can have him. We don't need him or anyone like him here." Realizing belatedly that this might be considered insensitive, she tacked on, "sorry, but he just left us without even asking if we wanted to go, so he's dead to me."
Hoping to get onto another topic before Lasher had time to say the usual, "your father loves you," that so many adults seemed sure of, she chose to spill the beans. "Listen, Lasher, uh... have you ever seen a... a ghost?"
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she was acting strangely, and he looked past her once more, his gaze firmer this time. after a lingering moment, lasher returned his attention to saena, wincing mildly at the girl's angered use of the epithet against fox. yet he said nothing — surely she had been lectured and the situation had been explained to her many a time. lasher did not like the ruby, but he was somehow sorrowful that fox had also shunned the children of peregrine's first union.
yes,
he murmured to her with a nod, ears upright with interest. this was the second conversation in as many weeks regarding ghosts. i have seen many.
the murkwater eyes narrowed, then cleared, softening. have you seen a ghost, saena?
taltos asked quietly, wondering if this was the reason for her abrupt behavior.
Her imagination ran away with her in the brief moment that Lasher looked past her. She imagined him telling her ghosts were imaginary, that they didn't exist and only fools looked for them. She imagined him saying she was seeing things. She even imagined that he compared her to a younger Tytonidae and shook his head regretfully at how childish Saena was for her age, this last being proof of how little she really knew about Lasher.
She was therefore shocked when he said yes, and flabbergasted when he said "many". Were there that many ghosts in the world? Saena immediately hoped there wasn't; what if she saw them, too, and then she started seeing more ghosts than real wolves?
"I dunno," she said, more slowly and calmly than anything else she'd said thus far. "I saw a bear. A little one, but it was see through and its eyes were really creepy." She blinked up at her father's former lover, awaiting confirmation that it was indeed a ghost so she could swoon and faint, or something equally dramatic to match the realization that she was seeing the dead.
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it seemed saena had glimpsed the supernatural, and lasher settled carefully onto his haunches, inviting her with an incline of his muzzle to do the same. i believe you have seen a spirit. a ghost, in my opinion, is the shade of the ones we have loved and who have passed on from this life into the next. spirits surround us, and it seemed one showed itself to you, for whatever reason.
he spoke calmly, gently, as not to frighten the patched girl more than she already appeared to be. there was naught to fear from spirits. is this the first time you have seen such things?
came taltos' next inquiry; to see one spirit was an isolated event; to see many was a gift.
Spirits, ghosts, they were all the same to Saena. They were things that shouldn't be real, but that she'd just moments ago seen irrefutable proof of. Whether the bear was a ghost or a spirit, whatever the difference was, was a debate for another time. Lasher had questions, and Saena, yearning to know more, was eager enough to answer them.
"Yes," she said without hesitation, "but when I thought Junior was dead, I thought I saw her for a few days. I guess I made it up." At the time, she'd been desperate to hide this knowledge from Lasher—he'd come across her speaking to the imaginary Osprey Jr., after all—but now it seemed silly to keep anything from her father's lover. The kinship was imagined, of course. She knew almost nothing of Lasher and had no reason to trust in him, but she liked to think they were on the same team, two wolves equally scorned by the once loyal Peregrine. That put him at a distinct advantage with Saena, who clung to those with similarity to herself.
"Is it... bad?"
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as she spoke, he recalled the day he had come upon her when she was rather young, and she had tried to hide what she was doing from him. he had not pressed her then, as he would not now; though he did wonder if these experiences were related. not at all,
the gamma answered swiftly. sometimes it can be a very good thing.
sometimes spirits speak to those who can see them,
taltos went on. did it speak to you,
the man asked, wishing to gather an accurate picture of the experience saena had gotten from her glimpse of the bearcub.
It already felt like her encounter with the ghost or spirit or whatever it was happened hours ago. She could scarcely remember its details. It took the shape of the bear and had pale eyes, but she couldn't remember how tall it was, the shape of its ears, whether it was a grizzly or a black bear or some other type of bear. These details were lost, the woeful shortcoming of short-term memory.
But, upon wracking her brain, the teen was sure it hadn't said anything. "No," she said at last, certain this was the correct answer. "It didn't say anything. It didn't follow me either." That was probably the creepiest thing of all: the bear had just stood there and stared at her. She didn't know its intentions or what it meant, just that it was there and now it was nowhere to be seen.
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the gamma had seen many ghosts in his time; there was talk of he himself having been a spirit at one point. this had been neither confirmed nor denied to the earthen servant, and so he felt he would be of no assistance to saena on that point.
she revealed that the bear had not spoken to her, merely gazed, and he mused over what this meant, and why spirits had chosen her, a half-grown girl, to show themselves unto. what do you think that it meant?
he asked, placing the focus of their conversation with her own thoughts on the matter.
Wow I let this thread get seriously outdated, my bad! Maybe we can just fade it out with your post?
"Dunno," said the juvenile, though a little shiver danced up her spine at the thought that it meant anything at all. The bear had been creepy, but otherwise harmless. Perhaps it simply meant that she needed to get more rest. Saena wished she could claim she was just seeing things, but that made her sound too much like her sister, and she wasn't too keen on the idea.
"What could it mean?" she asked then, interested in his take on things. As far as Saena knew, Lasher was an expert in all things spiritual and would have answers that she couldn't come up with herself.
sounds good to me!
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any number of things,
was his response, and, pleased that saena was speaking so amiably with him, lasher gestured that she should walk alongside him. therefore he began his explanations of the spirits and their worlds to her eager ears.