Wheeling Gull Isle below her mouth

Komodo had risen before the sun that morning, but not without purpose. The evening prior, the idea came to him to bless this place, and the new residents who filled its walls, both young and old — it had come to his mind less than it had rushed to fill him, and that was how the the roguish angakkuq knew this was the bidding of the gods. Komodo found that sleep came difficult; and once it had come, waking was even more so! There was no winning when the gods had plans for him, so he relented, left the side of his raven and went to forage for supplies just as the tender pinks and citrus hues of sunrise began to percolate out from under the eastern hills.

The man was looking for the last of summer’s coastal herbs — he had nearly missed the season in his travels, which had been a consequence Komodo decided he just had to deal with. There had been fires in the area recently, he had scried even before they had reached again the Teekon’s coast, but still he was able to find some wild, white sage and various sprigs of plants in the colors gold and green, the colors of strength and unconditional love, respectively.  Later, whenever the saline-thick air would allow the sage to dry, he was crush tit into a fine powder with a makeshift mortar and pestle and spread it across the islands to bless and nurture the earth so that it may better support the lives of the seawolves. The small boughs would be strategically placed on the earth and within low-lying tree branches in order to facilitate the movement of energies and better direct their effects upon the wolves. Feng shui, anyone? 

But, for now, all plant matter lay in a small pile on the beach’s sands, far from where the lapping tide could reach them. At first glance, it might have appeared to be abandoned, but not far out of view was Komodo — waist deep in the waves, stand staunch and sturdy as they pounded methodically against his barrel-like chest, eyes closed, thinking of everything and nothing at the same time.

@Coelacanth, if you got a second between kitten cuddles?

Tags for reference.

Coelacanth did not seek out the Earthstalker immediately upon his return. She told herself that this was because he needed time to reacclimate — and to help dear `Io reacclimate — but the island knew its Aralez sometimes better than she knew herself, and when she peered at her reflection in the clear, still surface of Skybowl, a coward’s eyes peered guiltily back. The isle, under governance of sea and sky, born of a storm, was not always kind — but it was always truthful. Seelie was afraid.

She wanted all to be forgiven and healed between herself and the angakkuq. She wanted to achieve a pinnacle of perfect serenity, despite her grandmother’s constant assertions that such a feat was impossible even for gods. The truth of the matter was that @Komodo had frightened her that day in the Labyrinth — on the heels of ruining her playdate with Driftwood! — and these smirches on the medicine man’s previously unsullied armor had forced Seelie to acknowledge something she didn’t want to see. More than that, Komodo’s assertion that she was a tease and @Aditya’s torment only a few later had shown the Aralez a side of herself she didn’t want to see.

It was hard for the Groenendael to accept imperfection in others. It was virtually impossible to accept imperfection in herself. Not even @Stockholm knew what had really gone down in the Labyrinth or the willow grove, because she couldn’t bear to tell him and have him realize that she was not a good dog after all.

Her restless wandering led her to the Strand, and as if placed by some divine hand, there stood Komodo himself, his chest and belly licked by the waves. He rocked with them, rooted to the earth, water, and sky. Not for the first time, Seelie recognized the Earthstalker as a supremely attractive specimen of masculinity and strength — and her focus turned inward to ask her grandmother: do I have to?

No. But you should.

Coelacanth pressed forward, the trembling of her limbs absorbed by the soft, cool sand. She did not stop until both forelimbs were half-submerged, the feathering at her wrists blurring like cuttlefish ink beneath the surface. She did not announce herself; Komodo would feel her, surely, or the ocean would tell him.

She was not as stealthy as she might believe. Her arrival was made known by the delicate stirring of the crystalline waters at her hocks, turning back on itself and pooling and making noises that were audible only to those who chose to hear it. The winds shifted, as they always did when Coelacanth stepped onto the scene, and with it carried her scent — sweet and warm and briny, as it always had been. Komodo also just had a sense about these things, and he had felt that he might encounter the inky aralez alone one of these days. 

The earthstalker  wasn’t entirely sure what had taken so long. He was open to the possibility of moving on and restoring their relationship to its former glory, if such a thing could ever be achieved again — wasn’t she? Now there were children to consider, and not simply his hungry whims and what Komodo still very much believed to be her reluctance to admit the truth — but it’s totally cool. Totally fine. Komodo was a man committed, now, and Coelacanth a mother. Their entire dynamic changed, and stripped of the sexual tension that once it had been rife with. They were lucky for it, and after an absence of several months, he was eager to move on. 

Though Komodo lingered in his trance for a moment longer, he eventually turned towards the little sheepdog and strode forward a step or two, putting distance between him and the crashing of the waves. He dared not speak, and instead bowed his significant head, neck, breast and shoulders in a formality that did not need to be voiced. He would leave it at that, and let the girl test the waters of moving forward — and perhaps speaking — upon level ground. 

Coelacanth met him in the middle, placing herself at his mercy as she, too, humbled herself before him. Her proud, if diminutive, carriage dipped; her graceful neck craned; and her muzzle tucked submissively against her décolletage. Tufted ears pressed forward upon her skull with mute eloquence in the wake of her prayerful obeisance — she was ready to talk, but she was also ready to actively listen to any concerns he might have. She had practiced her testimony so many times that she thought she knew the words by heart, but as her eyes traced the much beloved planes and lines of his face, every syllable fell away. “Modo,” she breathed softly, or perhaps she merely mouthed the word, the glow of the sea illuminating her inkdark silhouette in ghostly blue. Beneath the scent of brine, she tasted `Io on his scent — but she was not stupid enough anymore to believe that what they had and what they felt was the same as what she and Stockholm had and felt. Every wolf was different.

“I love you, Modo,” she whispered without preamble. “I love you ever — my friend, my family — but for mate,” she stamped a paw against the sea bottom and clicked her teeth together to place visible and aural emphasis on the word, barred the ability to do so verbally, “my heart sleep.” Maybe that sounded insulting; the flutter of her tufted ears as they slicked nervously against her skull said she hoped not. “Stockholm wake, all otter sleep.” She meant “all other” but she would never really achieve fluency of the spoken word. “I think…” she ventured, “kiss, hold, play, for all love.” For Coelacanth, the invisible RESTRICTED line was drawn literally at sex. All other forms of affection were to be freely shared — and if Stockholm had been wired the way she was, she would have equally condoned this freely loving trait in him. He wasn’t, though, and so the double standard wasn’t as unfair as it may have seemed.

Silence persisted between them for several moments, and Komodo tried hard to keep his brain from whirring to life and trying to make sense of this. Logic was not a woman’s weapon — they relied on emotion and passion, which were lovely things, but Komodo figured he would rather wait for the Aralez to speak first, lest anything he said be held against him. He considered it a shame that he could not be entirely truthful with her — when it came to that, they spoke two different languages. There would always need to be a buffer between them, and that was something Komdo was willing and fine with.

Komodo listened as she began to explain herself, her words punctuated with stamps of her feet and the whirling of her facial features, but it was not anything he had not heard from her before. It was almost the same thing she had said to him that fateful night in the labyrinth, sans all the heat-of-the-moment, so Komodo knew she meant it. He meant it, too. The man was most happy with the zany, blue creature that had taken up residence at his side — she was all the things he loved. Canine with a unlearned tongue; the coincidence had not gone unnoticed.

But, in all honesty, breeding season was soon approaching and Komodo was totally certain that he and his raven would breed. Would they be good parents? They both were so wild that at time, he doubted it, but whatever. It had been years since he had sired, and since the prior breeding season’s confusion with the sheepdog before him, the need had only grown — but, Komodo did not want every of his interactions with Coelacanth to revert into an internal monologue about reproduction, so he stopped himself, pulled himself up and relented to the tiny inkspot’s will. 

“That’s nah’ how it werks, kitten,” explained as the man who had been around the sun more than just a few times. “but ah’ll try, fer yew.”

A tender smile softened the tiny Groenendael’s intensely worried expression. She and Komodo had a great deal of work to do in order to rebuild their still-smouldering bridge, but she believed they could — and would. They were healers, after all! “Sing of Chelan,” she begged, dipping her nose below surface to playfully splash the Earthstalker. She was as willing to respect his wishes as he was to respect hers, and if he did not want her to overindulge her affectionate tendencies around him, she wouldn’t. She was learning, interaction by interaction, that not everybody felt as she and Stockholm did. If she wanted to be a Good Dog by the Teekon Wilds’ standards, she was going to have to rein in her often overexuberant need for touch.

She listened raptly as Komodo recounted Chelan and Illahee’s love story in his honeyed, rollicking way; and he did not demur when she asked him to repeat the names of their children several times over. Tallulah, Tolikna, Taima, and Taipa, she thought to herself, wishing enviously that she and Stockholm had thought of naming all their children with the same letter. The Seelholms were bound by a theme, but she wondered if they’d stick with that theme through the current breeding season or change it up. She thought, but did not say aloud, that it would be lovely to see the children Komodo and `Io would produce. Instead, when the medicine man was finished regaling her with news from home, Seelie gently withdrew and returned to her mate’s side to pass on what she’d learned — and to propose a visit to Morningside.