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with every wishbone i break, every candle on every cake - Phaedra - June 09, 2020
nobody needs to read this novella thx playing catch up with myself nbd for ic canon
she was playing by herself in the lupine wildflowers near the pinewood. phaedra carried out her days ranging the bounds of their new digs. two (three? the kid couldn't count, neither can the author) full moons had come and gone since they'd left, and her mood was noticably brighter for the changes in scenery, although she was disheartened to find there were no enchantments quite like her fairy circle by the peach tree that dropped its nectarean loot, or anything that resembled her sacral garden at their birth eyrie for that matter.
regardless, the fair fledgling had the freedom to roam, something she did not possess before, and that made up for the things she missed from their modest hearthstone on the sylvan ridge.
a longer tether meant phaedra did not have to endure as much curriculum either (or maybe that was because her father was rushed off his feet to minister to the needs of his covenanted bassinet at a moment's notice), and supervision was commonly undertaken by an unfamiliar face.
alas, phaedra, ever the fugacious child often had to be tracked down and flocked back to the red tape of the rendezvous site like a straggler goose. the way she mithered and squawked when caught suggested she may have well been part one. wylla, would you please take the stand?
~
in her overhasty tread into the pinewood (verboten) while chasing after a snake (probably also verboten following recent events), phaedra hadn't realized she'd journeyed on the path of a fuzzy looking snake until he'd loudly huffed and scurried up a tree. their eyes intersected, connecting for a brief moment, and then both crouched to their bellies with alarm. him, now safely on his respective branch. her, grounded and stunned into stillness. snakes def didn't climb trees ... that she knew of.
"wadt're you?""who are you?" their voices coincided. a silence fell between them, both gawking at the other. "you firsd." phaedra stipulated, more interested in knowing what he was than imparting information regarding herself. her name couldn't possibly be more interesting than a species of fuzzy snake.
"a marten ..." he said, flexing his grip on the branch with anxiety.
"a ... mar-den? never seen one befow. thoughd you was a fuzzy snake fox thing."
he snorted with irritation. "mar-t-en. now you have. i thought you were just a klutz who wasn't watching where she was going. turns out one of us was right!"
"i was wadching but you di'ind even move or nothing before i almos' sep'd on you!" she tried to explain, annoyed at his attitude. sitting plumb on her bottom at the base of the tree, her was neck starting to crick from looking up but she was worried if she looked away he would vanish like a fish.
after a few beats of mutual barbed staring, he pressed. "anyway, i went. you have to tell me your name now."
"nuh-uh. i don' have da do nothing."
"yes you do! i went first, you go second! i told you what i was, now you tell me who you are, it's unfair otherwise." he bristled at her dismissive tone, voice squeaking with youth and indignation.
"fine, but i never saw anydhing like you, so my name is a deadly secred, god id?" she insisted, mostly for the sport of it, but also because this so-called marten looked a lot like the foxes she'd watched her mother chase out of their glen and phaedra wasn't entirely confident that his own mother wasn't one using her deformed son as bait. "an' you godda swear you nod really a fox." she narrowed her gaze.
suddenly, he scrambled down from the tree and huffily crowded into her space. "i'm not a fox! mum says foxes prey on us, and you look more like one than me anyhow, so i should be the one not trusting you. but i am, because you aren't clever, and mum said that's a dead give away when it comes to foxes. so we'll just have to trust each other. 'deadly secret', sure, fine, now spit it out."
she pulled back when he took great exception to her accusation and imposed himself on her. she wasn't clear about what clever meant, but the way he worded it made it somehow feel like an insult, so she took a moment to leer at him crossly before giving him her name. "OK OK! eesh ..." she glanced furtively around, as if they would be set upon at any moment. the marten also glanced, feeling similarly ill at ease. "mine name ids phaedra." she perked up in an abruptly perfectly agreeable manner, a smile making its flashy debut. "do you got a name?"
he sniffed at her legs, which she plucked back promptly. he flinched and scoffed, eyeballing her from stem to stern. "yeah but i'll only tell if you promise to keep it a deadly secret too ..." he seemed to be playing along with her, though nothing about the expression on his face belied any seriousness.
phaedra nodded with earnest affirmation: she wouldn't dare breathe it. probably.
"alright. my mum named me caintigern. i don't want to hear you make weirdness of it, so just call me cain." the young marten tried again to sniff her, stiffened, then scrabbled back up the pine tree.
"soooo theeeen ... where yow mama, cain?"
caintigern twitched his nose. "i could ask you the same. mum says me and my sister are old enough to be on our own now. been alone for a few sun ups." he confessed with a bit of pride, and a bit of melancholy. phaedra sensed both and sat in pensive silence for several heartbeats.
she was astonished, she herself couldn't concieve of being away from mother for longer than a few hours! the world was so gigantic and beyond her ken, it was both exciting and daunting. she thought this caintigern very brave for it, and that perhaps what he needed was the very same something she yearned for.
the question she asked next was uncomfortable, but was vitally important to the establishment of their aborning rapport ... if there was to be one. "do um ... do ya think we nod s'pose do be ... fends? y'know, cuz ... ?" she grimaced at the unspoken thought.
"well, when i first saw you, something inside told me to run away. that's common sense when someone is about to run you over, but it felt different. so i would say ... yeah. mum taught us to stick to the trees and watch out for big toothed sort but she didn't say anything about big paws so you caught me off guard." they both giggled quietly, a shameful apology passing like a cloud over phaedra's face. "besides, you're talking to me, which nobody else has tried, so i don't think you plan on eating me?" amusement edged his voice.
the girl burrowed into her thoughts. she noted that he said his insides told him to run, like hers told her to blow groceries when she licked the tree blood, but he didn't, and nothing inside her was urging to give chase (papa might have instilled such urges in her had he not a duty to a distich of his newest lionized heirs, but that was neither here nor there).
she was encouraged to give a voice to her earlier thinking. "nodt a planner. well, no one saids we cand be fends 'cepd yow ma, and you is on yow own now, so maybe id's okay ... ? like wah'if we meeded up here do go play? you can say no ... i jus' don' really have any fends. 'cepd one," she admitted, sweeping her paw through felled pine needles, thinking of stag and how guilty she would feel hiding a new playfellow from him. though, little did phaedra know, stag had procured his own new playfellow; a childhood friend, someone his age, had resurfaced. surely a toddler was of lesser interest to him now.
"i guess it couldn't hurt. to play, i mean. i don't ... i don't really either. have friends. we martens don't really get along with eachother." cain said after a pregnant pause in the conversation, stretching languidly on his mossy branch, peering down at the pudgy face of the wolf pup. "i don't suppose its too much to ask you come up here, though?"
phaedra cast him a look that read 'are you frickin kidding me' in bold typeface.
"right, fair enough. was only checking. ever since you and others like you came into the area, no foxes been botherin' me, so i don't see any harm in us playing. this here tree isn't my home though, so if you stand at the treeline and shout a code word, i'll know it's you." he remarked.
"code word? oh, yes! if only i yell 'sicher!' id means safe in a secred language. but if a boy voice yells id, sday away." she warned him sternly, brows ingathering with the seriousness of her warning. she could see thade making a plaything of cain's musky tail if he got the chance, and she was never confident either of the boys weren't eavesdropping on her outings. luckily today she'd made sure both were too distracted to hunt after her.
"i'll listen for you, but no promises, i got my own stuff to do just the same as you do." he said, already starting to shinny up higher into the pine. "pinecone!" he shouted down.
phaedra strained her neck to watch him, but the sunlight blazed in her eyes, and before she could process his warning, the ballistic pinecone struck her directly between the eyes. "OW! wuh da ffffff—" she rubbed her clobbered phiz against the ground, shook her snout with a snort, and when she looked up again, caintigern had sloped off. "tschüss, caindigwen!" mangling his name as he expected.
her cheeks cramped from the smile she held as she made tracks for home with a peartness in her step.