Big Salmon Lake i think i left my conscious on your front door step

He follows the river once more in the manner that led him to his biological father's front door, the passageway he takes to escape both his foul-tempered siblings and the darkness that he has not yet grown to love. But he does not leave in abandon of what he has not yet grown to love, but out of simple curiosity: what lay beyond what he does not know? If he had managed to find what could have very well been his much older doppelgänger, what else lurked beyond the woods were the only company he had was the shadows and the various heads that sat rotting on the borders? It was question, that at four months of age, he was ready to be answered.

Calculative as he is grounded, he watches at the sun begins its slow retreat behind the mountians, pushing his pace even faster than his attempt to get away without his mother knowing. The river takes him north, past the lake, and beyond a brammble of rot and wire to a much smaller yet unfamiliar lake once more. He almost begins to wonder if this is in fact the very same Greatwater Lake, but decides against it, the boy's sense of direction is too great to have been tricked into roaming around in one big circle; or perhaps it is the threat of what his one-eyed mother may do if she finds him missing that causes him to deny the possibility of misfooting. So, instead, he leans down to lap at the waters edge, optics gazing out at the sun's rays casting a dark shadow across the mass.

He will return here, he is sure, but he is very much unaware of the proximity of which he stands so close to the edges of another pack. A pack that has history with his own. A history involving certian thralls and bastards and enemies of the regent who owns his birth-land. How interesting, and how blissfully unaware is he of this.

The boy has never encountered another child outside the dark woods before. Like Hydra, he knows little of how to act in such a situation, his social abilities rendered useless in the face of not only a fellow young being, but a girl. A pretty girl. He watches silently from within his perhipherals as she observes him, watching, and eventually deciding against approaching. Vaati has little mind to approach either, there is very little reason. Vaati is not a boy without reason; he exists on simple logic. But nevertheless, she is something new, something peculiar, and he simply has to know. It is a feeling that overwhelmed him in the face of his biological father, and does so exeedingly in the company of a girl who mimicks the colouring of his sisters. He almost has to take a close look to make sure it is in fact a stranger, and not Koume stalking him once more. But the eyes blinking back are two eyes different, and as if gravity takes hold, pulls him closer to the stranger. He does not speak; existing in plain silence is a much more convinient alternative for the viking child than to attempt to impress a girl who he very well knows, has no interest in him. Instead, he simply stares, mere meters away, staring at her with an inquisitive awe that he cannot manage to put his finger on. The boy has very little idea of how weird he looks doing so.