Wolf RPG

He was keeping close to the spine. Things were far too new and far too fresh for him to travel far from home. Newly mated. Newly father-to-be. Newly alpha. All things that had fallen upon him in such a short amount of time that his adjustment had been hard and fast. There was no room for error. No forgiveness for mistakes or the casual slip-up. Failure was not an option. He wouldn't let it be.

His mind hardened as he fell, sinking into the depths of instinct that left his blood on a low boil. His ears lifted, eyes narrowed as he hyper-focused on securing their borders. He would take no chances. Wolves would smell them and turn back. Local predators would keep their distance. No hint of threat would mar their borders. The stakes were high. He'd take no chances. No one from the outside would learn of their Spine.

Leg lifted, he pissed on a tree. He'd taken their current bounds and pushed them wider, strengthening their warnings and freshening their claim so there was no room for excuses. No room for sniveling. No room for intruders or anyone feigning innocence of not knowing where they trod. Damn wolves could use their noses or lose their heads.

He pressed onward.

In the cool evening, Tonravik kept close to the borders. She met up with her mate midway, coming from the opposite direction. She, too, marked the outskirts at a wider berth, now and again bearishly scraping the wood within Neverwinter Forest so that her scent glands would warn others to stay back. The forest, a good portion of it, was well guarded by the Spine. If you entered the portion of the forest that the Spine marked, you were too close already. Close enough to be killed. If one could not use their nose, they had little chance of surviving anywhere else anyway. If they were the ones to play the reaper on the day of their mistake, so be it.

Tonravik chuffed lowly to her mate, ear twitching. He looked less exhausted, well-rested, and recharged. He had found his place. Surprising though it was, it was; not even she could dispute it. It was a spot well earned and hard-fought. Iqniq would do fine; she had carried the heavy weight of the Spine independently before, and the alpha female let out a deep rumble as she moved beside him. He was not alone in this. She too marked freely, darting ahead every so often to sniff at the earth. If it did not satisfy her, she'd rub herself into the ground, glands releasing her dominant scent.

He fell up against the side of a tree and rubbed. One, scent marking. This place was also his now and he was going to let every wolf know it. Two, his side itched. The bark managed to hit the spot just right and he shimmied against it, moving to curb the sensation away as he went about his business. There. That was better.

His paws carried him once again when Tonravik appeared, joining him as she resumed her own efforts at marking their territory. She made a sound towards him. He sniffed back, loudly as she bee-lined for him, stood aside him, and pressed onward to rub her scent between the markings he already place. Kerosene turned, watching as she darted through the trees as if to make a game of this chore. She thrived at this and of course, he had no objections to way her scent covered every inch of their home.

A brief canter and he joined her in this activity. He scented the ground, pissing where appropriate, rubbing if necessary, and letting his paws score the trees if all else failed. Tonravik rolled. He caught the thud of her body falling against the earth as she kicked up dirt and dust and made a mess of herself. Kero circled back around, tucking his nose briefly beneath her tail before he circled and drew his fur against her own. Shoulder to shoulder, he lifted his head and wrapped soft teeth about her ear; playing.

A well seasoned woman of marking her territory, Tonravik went about the task with gusto. These things she did not tire of, because she could not; her instinct kept her returning to these spots, to reestablish the claim time and time again. That any wolf miss these markers simply meant they had a death wish. In these matters, Tonravik was a veritable genie; their wish would surely come true. They need not even rub a lamp, so eager was she to grant it. Wish for death here, and ye shall receive. It was not a true desire of hers, but when one overstepped their bounds, there was simply no other way.

As she rose, dirt clinging to her, one ear tipped backward as her mate came beside her. The alpha female did not look to him. She should have; maybe then she would have avoided her ear in his mouth. It was an uncomfortable sensation, and Tonravik let him know with a low growl. Although his teeth were soft, it was not a place her ear enjoyed being, and so she let out a growl, unable to retaliate until he released her.

There was no denying her presence. Physical or in traces upon the ground, she was everywhere. This place was hers through and through. One day, his own scent might be as engrained upon the borders, but his endeavors here were still new and it was far more difficult to pick out the scent of oneself. For him, it was all her. Mostly. She drowned out the scents of their pack mates. Hers was more thorough. More true.

She did not take kindly to his affections of play. The growl warned him off, leaving Kero to nudge her beneath the nose as he took to leaning his shoulder against her shoulder instead. A nuisance, perhaps, but they'd each circled these borders once and now that they'd crossed paths they could entertain themselves with something else. He'd gotten to know some aspects of her character in a short span of time, but there was still so much more to discover.

The dirt within her pelt caused him to sneak. He stepped away, shaking his head to clear his nose before he looked back in her direction. A playful wag touched his tail as a curious gleam rose within his eyes. She was a silent creature, but he'd drawn words from her before. Perhaps he could manage it again. "You always find the best ways to make your appearance more grotesque." A comment directed towards her dirtied pelt, but he knew Toni did not care for such frivolous details. "We could make it worse."

After releasing her ear he nudged beneath her chin. Tonravik waved her tail and attempted to bump her muzzle against his, before swinging it in the opposite direction. They were shoulder to shoulder as they had been for many days. Partners. His sneeze caused her to start, muzzle wrinkling before realizing the mighty sound had just been him. Looking at him, and knowing well the mischievous gleam in his eye by now, the leader openly searched his face, and tried to think of what he might be thinking. Tonravik was only imaginative when it came to fighting and thinking of ways to kill others when bored, but that was the extent of it.

He spoke on her appearance again, and she might have swatted him had she known what the word "grotesque" meant. As it stood, the leader took it as a compliment. More powerful, she presumed the word must mean. And as he spoke of making it worse, the leader tilted her head. Worse? How? Why? Did she want to know? She continued in her step, pausing only pee upon a lonely leaf that bent beneath the weight of her mark.

Tonravik did not speak, still, simply thoughtful. "I do not think so." It fit. She did not think she could make her appearance any more powerful than he was. She was scarred, muscled, and a beast as it was. Perhaps he would know she did not grasp exactly what he meant by what he said, or perhaps he would think the woman self-deprecating.

She appeared to ignore him as she marched away to squat on a leaf. A leaf? Really? Something that would blow away once dry? He lifted a brow towards her and dismissed it, pressing his nose to the ground to search for another spot that needed a little more reinforcement. He found it and rolled, rubbing his body against the earth before he rose and shook out the dust from his hide.

"It wouldn't be such a bad thing," he murmured, chancing the conversation further. "Might work in your favor to scare other wolves away." He knew nothing of her disconnect. She seldom spoke. There was no way for him to know what words her vocabulary held, especially since some of them were in a language of her own. He'd discover the extent of her knowledge eventually, but for now he wrongly assumed she'd understood.

"This way," he tipped his head further in the direction she was heading, the same direction from which he'd early come. Still minding their duties of enforcing the borders, he lifted a leg here and there and scored a few trees as they breezed through this area of the wood. Until he found it. A mud puddle leftover from a previous rain. It still held enough water to keep the soil wet. Kero looked to her and gestured towards the puddle, encouraging her to give it a go.

His words merited him a thoughtful look. Scare them away? These wolves outside were idiots. They would need to die to be kept away, she felt. They had no fear of their mortality, which surely she would take from them one wolf at a time as they grew more stupid and took more chances.

Tonravik had no qualms in moving with him, and wondered at his words and gesture. I have been moving this way. She nipped gently at his face, wondering why he filled peaceful silence with words. Wolves enjoyed hearing themselves speak. While it was obnoxious for Tonravik, at this point, hearing him had become something she was used to. His voice did not grate on her nerves as most did.

Then they arrived to a puddle and she stared at the muddy thing. Tonravik rolled in dirt and mud frequently on hot days to cool herself, or to mask her scent. Otherwise, there was no point. So she looked to him, wondering what he was thinking.

He knew she was a creature of black and white. This or that. No in between. He was very much a creature of the gray. He thought of things. Measured and calculated. He considered options and weighed them equally. He considered circumstances and scenarios. For him. There was more than life or death. For those who intruded? A good rumor of fear would do well to protect their borders. Upon his arrival to theses wilds he'd been warned away from Blackfeather Woods. If they could create the same sort of fear about the spine... it might serve well to send others far from their borders.

To communicate this, he'd need words. What were words, after all, but agreed upon grunts and woofs and combinations of sounds sorted together to represent other wolves, places or things? It was instinctual. Knowledge and knowing and communicating was a natural thing. Words were not so out of line from her instinct, and yet she retained her silence. He'd grown comfortable with it, her silence, but there was only so much he could share with nips and nudges.

They arrived at the puddle and she seemed confused even as he pointed towards it. Moving closer to her, he nudged his nose against her haunches as if to push her closer to the mud. And then he stopped. This would be far less fun than he had hoped if she didn't understand what he was getting at, so he abandoned his efforts and let out a huff.

What would she understand? Death. Protecting. Fighting. Hunting. Survival. All things that left a wolf rigid and tense. He sighed and lowered himself to the ground. Laying upon his stomach, he looked up to her.

His nudge was met with a glance to him, then to the muddy area. Tonravik truly was very little fun. He huffed, then lay, and the rigid and tense wolf moved in a semi-circle so she faced him. She, too, lay, her stomach falling naturally into the mud and her tail moved in a meek wave. Somehow she had disappointed him, she could sense. Her own forelegs stretched out and she shimmied forward.

The leader was not sure what she had done to disappoint him. Nothing life or death, surely. So Tonravik looked to the fiery wolf and let out a heavy huff of her own, warm air erupting from her nostrils. But the wolf was happy nonetheless, and so her tail thumped against the muddied earth, sending droplets of the stuff raining all around them in an unromantic fashion.

He sank to the ground and she mirrored him. Kero watched her, pressing his eyes closed as her tail wagged and flung dirt around them. He snorted, sending back a puff of his own breath. His whiskers twitched and he wrinkled his nose, thinking for a second before he parted his mouth to lick at her nose. The crazy. He'd teach her what it meant to have fun eventually... but now that he had her undivided attention?

"Tell me about Tartok." He'd heard the word in passing, but he'd been told nothing of it. These wolves here? They were different they held to a certain moral code and there were days when he still felt as though he were on the outside looking in. If he were to truly be of this world he needed to know. Who better to ask than the wolf who lived and breathed that which he was asking?

As his warm tongue came against her nose she mirrored the action without thought, head turning when she heard something in the distance. Her attention fell onto him again as he asked her a question... and the female licked her chops. If he wanted words from her, this question was the best way to get them.

"They are my family," she begins, and pauses to amend herself. "Our family." For now, in being with her, it had been something he would inadvertently become. He, now, was Tartok too. She drew in a deep breath, thinking of the stories she had been told as a cub.

"Some years ago, my mother wished to begin her family. She lived beneath her sisters rule. Her sister did not agree with her desire, and so my mother cast out on her own." It was only the lead pair who mated and had cubs, after all. "My mothers name is Siku," she thinks to add, pausing to continue. "And it was not only this that caused her to go." There were plenty of reasons her mother had left. For a time her mother suffered Nanuq's punishment of bearing a rank of shame in leaving and returning, but when her mother remained for many months and fought out of the position, her sister was unfair in her judgment. When it came to light that Siku would never lead, she went on her way, as any dispersal wolf would when it was their time.

Another thing occurred to her. "Koios was the mate of my mothers sister. My mother had found him dead, killed by a bear. And she was blamed for his death." Siku could not protect herself against her sisters words in her leaving; but she did not ever think they would come, those words, those emotions. The other was weak for it. The other that, in all of these tales, was never even given a name to honor her by. Although the sisters had forgiven one another by this point, it did not change the trials that Siku had gone through. "Her sister caused the Valley they lived in to turn against them. My mother managed to gather a good number to her side... but the odds were against them. There was a day where the battle would be had. But all realized that Siku was not wrong, and no murderer, and so none fought." Her mother had somehow gotten the others to see her sisters error.

"Tartok came to be from that. And my mother would have none but the strong. The Valley had accepted her, then, but not her sister. So Tartok came to be of warriors and soldiers, and it only ever grew, until wolves dispersed, taking the name with them." Tartok became a breed as much as it did a name. The place still stood in the Valley, among other locations. "A male named Sevendeath led the legion in Seahawk, where she was born and raised, when she left to conquer elsewhere." He had been old, and now his own cubs likely led in his stead.

That was the tumultuous story of their origin.

"My mother and her sister are fine, have amended ways. But I know nothing but the last name they once shared. Kesuk," she hums. "My mother took the name Tartok." Both her grandparents dead, Tonravik would never meet them, Nauja and Nutaaq. So Kesuk was nothing for her to be no part of. 

She lay on her side. "Tartok's creed is the strong survive. We can, we will." Even when the odds are against us. "We were made in the shadows, but now, others are cast in the dark of it. Tartok. Dark," she translates. As a cub, she was born in a time where even she needed to learn to protect herself lest the aggrieved, nameless sister come for her. It was why she knew all that she did, and only that.

One word and it was as though he'd unlocked the door to her many mysteries. Tartok. The word, concept, life of it breathed through her has she spoke on its origins and history. Born of fault. Born of shadow. Born of darkness. It explained much. The iron resolve. The stone will. The stubbornness. It seemed as though she'd taken her mother's creed and wore the banner of the past with just as much vigor and prowess.

For all of it, she spoke of others. Her mother. Her mother's sister. No where in that saga did she mention herself and how she related back to this Siku. "Where do you fall into this?" he asked. He'd heard the legend but not of the recent past. There was a gap between Siku and her daughter. Another between Siku and Kodiak who'd come of similar origins. There was more to this than the summary he'd received. "What is Tartok now?"

"Her lastborn in her first litter with Kilgharrah. Sisamat. I was chased off at a year, with my brothers." She was not mournful for this. "I came with Echelon. My aokkatti." Echelon had been silent in the days of past, but she knew Echelon was working diligently by her smell. "I moved into other branches. Learned more. Fought plenty. The branches are always large in number, demanding of prey. So there were frequent territory skirmishes. Then I went to begin another branch." Here, now. She drew in a breath. There was some time in-between, when she had met Kodiak in one of those battles, as she had met many; and plenty of the wolves were in passing.

"An empire," she surmised, having heard others call them that. One mighty empire. "A unified thing. Family," she lifts herself up back to her sphinx-like position, and looks at him. "We are Tartok."

He listened. It was all he could do. She spoke of such mysteries as though they were plain and simple. For her? They were. For someone of the outside world? He was starting to get a better ideas to what exactly he had fallen into. A brand new world. A brand new world with moral codes and words he did not understand. He would learn, with time. In this, she would have to speak as nudges could not convey these things on which she spoke. He pulled words from her.

"What is...aokkatti? he asked. He'd only encountered the wolf of which she spoke once. Scented the female here and there, but he'd not run into her since that incident with the coyotes after their kill.

The rest of what she spoke? He was starting to understand. This was her Tartok. Her version of what she knew. Some of those here came with such history and knew their ways. Most of them. Others would learn them with time. He would too. He knew it. He'd prove it. Until then? "Teach me."

"A... blood partner?" The English meaning she struggled with. "We battle together. Battle-buddy," she thinks, sifting through words. Echelon was her obvious opposite; she was small, lean, quick like a whip. Tonravik was large, bulky, slow but powerful. His interest in Tartok was all that she needed to know that he was one of them, that he was adapting, changing. Her nose moved to press against his own.

Anything that he wished to know, she would teach him.

Tonravik was impatient, but he at least was a quick learner.

"Those that lie, we must remove their tongue. Those that abandon us, when found, lose their tongue, too. Sometimes their life." It was a great trespass, to leave without a word. Ah. It occurred to her then to tell him, "Though some are permitted to drift to another branch. Create their own. Or leave, for a mission. I sent Sitri on one, to test his loyalty. If he returns, he is loyal. If not, he has been told and taught nothing. A wolf named Cara led before me and left wolves here... only one remains." One she would test. Loreley seemed soft, gentle. Was she? Truly?

Ahh. That made more sense. No wonder this wolf was so fond of the smaller she. As such, Kerosene was looking forward to getting to know the lithe female as soon as she decided to make herself comfortable enough to make a more lingering appearance. One day. Hopefully, he'd get to meet her more officially. Until then?

Tonravik leaned forward, pressing her nose against his. He pressed into it a bit, before easing up his touch. She was speaking again. He would listen. He shifted, mirroring that sphinx like pose save he twisted his hind quarters beneath him so both legs fell to one side.

The laws of Tartok were strict, but fair. He could see the reason for them and acknowledged the discipline behind such acts. No wonder this group was such a stony bunch. The consequences for falling out of line were somewhat severe. He'd learn them as occasions rose, but until then he had no issue in following suit and learning from the example she set.

Curious though. He'd known this pack was inherited under strange circumstances, but he wasn't aware of who was from which faction when the lines were drawn. "Who?" he asked, so that he might be aware of who came from a time before. "What will become of them?"

Tonravik thought to tell him of Echelon, too, who she had also sent off. Tartok was widespread; she was meant to find a close reach to it, if there was any. But her brother had spoken of his interest in creating one nearby... she was sure that he would. If not now, then soon... but it would be good to investigate. So she speaks with him on this, and then answers his questions of who. As for what would become of them?

They would find this out, when they returned, if they did. It would certainly not be bad for them to return to her; but if they did not, it mattered not. They knew too little of her and her ilk to worry. Tonravik had hoped for a comrade in Sitri; the weeks would tell her what she would end up finding later on.