Sea Lion Shores danger close

The air was oddly heavy that day. Moorhen lost sight of the island completely before she'd gone halfway across the sandbar, but she wasn't worried. At least, she wasn't worried about getting lost. What she was worried about was the strange scent that was beginning to surround her - a scent that she recognized well enough from her time at Bearclaw Valley.

The raven thought about Venninne and Indra and Laurel and the strange moods that had struck them, and about the little girl that had come and gone from the island and about a den brooded over by two luminous yellow eyes. And she wasn't afraid anymore of being grown up, or of pups, or of motherhood. She was just - thinking. Of the past and the future and the changing tides.

Speaking of tides - Moorhen had come out this way to sait her desire for red blood out from under Coelacanth's gaze. The waves were unusually low after the storm, it seemed, but the sea lions had returned, and Moorhen wanted one. The banded female stalked around the group, searching for stragglers or weaklings.

SIZZLE WANT KILL THINGS. [THUMPS CHEST, GRUNTS]

In the morning, Szymon looked upon his magnum opus — a miniature skyscraper of hard-won obsidian, flanked by smaller towers of carefully scavenged white shells — and experienced a gutwrenching, bonechilling wave of clarity.

Suddenly, he knew.

He knew that Doe had left him, ostensibly of her own volition, and that he would probably never find her again. He knew that they had failed their children — had failed Skellige and his children — and he knew that the ocean was only an ocean after all. There was no magic in the blackrock. There was no magic anywhere, anymore.

The bay, only a hundred meters or so from where he stood, where his children had been born and baptized, was only a place — and he no longer wished to own it. He turned away from it, his tail rippling like a live wire in his wake, but before he placed significant distance between himself and his former claim, he sought to sunder the pillars of onyx and alabaster. The shells toppled easily, creating a sound like breaking glass — but the stone fought him. He pushed at it with his paws and threw his body against it until finally it teetered and fell, and then he continued on with a churning hunger in his gut. Saliva pooled in his mouth as he approached the shoals, his sulphureous eyes locking on the dark brown figure with dull disinterest.

Moorhen didn't know exactly when Doe had stopped being her god; she only knew that it was somewhere between turning away from Kingfisher and stepping up to take on the rank that Doe had once filled. And she still sometimes woke in the night, having dreamed of those hot, wrathful eyes once more - but she'd come to realize that Doe was just a woman. A wolf like her. A small, pitiful creature. A ravening beast, like Aditya had become.

There was no magic in the world. She understood that, now. Not even in Coelacanth's ocean blue eyes, or the wild toss of the waves. Not in the markings on her ribs or in the sparkling caves beneath their island. All of it - the sea, the wolves, their island, herself - it was all just chance and the wild. There was only her choices and her heart and her will, and the blood and marrow and sinew that had built her into the powerful creature she was today.

But it had been a slow realization. Creeping and unsettling in the night, but a proud banner she wore today like the gilded cloak of a king, and her teeth were the crown and her mettle the scepter she ruled with. All heavy ornaments, but she had built herself up to this place, where she could take the weight of disillusionment and bear up underneath it with the bearing of Akhlut.

A pale figure caught her eye, and she watched this knowledge, this power, as it caved in on the man all at once.

Abandoning the sea lions, Moorhen turned her attention to the man and watched as he threw himself against the rocks. Her stomach churned, dark ears flying back uneasily at the sight. She was larger than the other wolf and in better shape, but she remembered the wrath of Aditya's madness and wisely kept her distance, even as the urge to investigate attempted to overwhelm her sensibilities.

She thought of Aditya and knew - knew in a bone-deep, dreadful sort of way - that the man would need to be put down. He was too close to her island, her family. Too wild. Too dangerous.

He turned toward her, and Moorhen watched with her own pulse beating uncomfortably loud in her ears. When he had turned, she'd seen a flash of something dark and terrible - something she had feared she would never see again. Something she had prayed - ardently, at times - she would never see again.

Szymon, she said, her voice hardly even a whisper. The dark woman remained rooted on the spot, all sense, reason, and will swiftly exiting her body.

“Szymon.”

Tattered ears shot forward upon the male’s skull, and a wrathful light danced briefly in his fool’s gold eyes before the rust and dust of all those lonely months snuffed it out. His tongue, swollen and bloodied from the previous night’s folly, flickered like a serpent’s to wet his cracked leather nose. “You,” he murmured hoarsely, his honeyed baritone thick and guttural with disuse. He recognized her, but he didn’t know her name. She was not Skellige, but she had her sire’s eyes. She was not Qilaq or Julep, but he had cared for her almost as ardently as his own daughters.

His daughters.

He waited for the pain, but it had stopped being novel and new long ago. Now it was simply a part of the clanwrecked Cairn’s daily existence — except when he could fool himself into believing that Doe was here and Skellige was pleased with him and everything was full of promise and prophecy. “D-D-Don’t,” he gritted, when the world began to fray at the edges and Moorhen’s taller, broader frame began to shrink down, one ear folding over, eerie yellow bleeding into mahogany. What was her name? What was her name? If he couldn’t remember it, she was going to turn —

“M-M-M-Moor…” trailed from his lips on the gust of a sigh as the jackknife twist of his spine smoothed out slightly. He heard Doe’s voice — “These are the children of the Leviathan, and we must always protect them,” — but Moorhen’s lips didn’t move in time, so he knew the illusion hadn’t taken hold. That was good — and bad. He’d rather have been speaking to his wife, whether she was real or not.

“H-Hunt,” he uttered pointedly, though he knew better than to try to command the larger, more steely-muscled female. He was more just…expressing his intention. He’d feel better, he thought, if he could kill something.

Time seemed to slow. He was looking at her and - gosh, she'd forgotten the color of his eyes. Gold, not mahogany. Not cool, winter green. Gold. And he was smaller than she remembered. Not the pillar of salt that had stood guard over her den. Not the behemoth that had lifted her in his jaws and carried her to safety. She remembered his warm body in the cave by the sea, the waves beating like a heartbeat against the rocks and echoing all around them. He'd smelled like salt and green sea creatures, and he'd been a bay of warm, gentle waters whenever the tidal wave that was Doe receded.

He looked at her and said, "You." And his voice was different, she thought, but she did not react beyond a faint flick of her ears, still shocked by his sudden reappearance. Seeing him here was different than reuniting with Isengrim. Different from meeting her brother. Those meetings had not swept the air out of her lungs this way, had not left her aching for the childhood that had never been, that could never have been. Her eyes traced the dark bands on his ribcage and she wanted - desperately, inanly, terribly - to go back. Back to the stone den. Back to Doe's wrath. Back to a cold winter and bony fish few and far between and Isen pulling on her ears until she should have cried but didn't, because seashells did not cry. Mostly, she wanted to go back to being small and warm against Szymon's pale chest, if only for a few seconds. Just so she could remember being safe and protected and loved and absolutely nothing else. Not a seashell. Not a wife. Not Ahklut.

But he was looking at her - No, the sea lions. And he said Hunt, not I will protect or We will warm as she had said to Redcliff, and Moorhen remembered that she was not a child. She was a woman, and she was a protector, and those times of being small and safe and precious were far behind her. The reminder made her want to fold in on herself for a moment, to weep and mourn for all the lost time and might-have-beens, but she'd been bearing up to these realities for so long, now.

Reluctantly, she pulled her eyes away from her uncle and scanned the masses of sea lions once more. They'd stopped paying attention to the wolves when it was clear they were focused on each other, but a few cast wary looks in their direction, now. Moorhen's stomach grumbled at the idea of sharing one of the pups with another wolf, so she pointed out a slim, streamlined juvenile on its way into adulthood. Likely too much for her to take on by herself, but perhaps just small enough to be overpowered between the two of him. "It?" she suggested, pointing her nose toward the outlier. It hadn't noticed them yet.

“It?”

Szymon was off like a shot before Moorhen’s tongue clicked the closing consonant of her monosyllabic query. He threw himself at the pinniped, a barbarian with nothing to lose, his broad paws gripping the sand and throwing it behind him. Lean jaws cracked wide and snapped shut on whatever they could reach, the tight coil of his hindquarters propelling him forward with disproportionate rage. The thunderclap of his maw rang with nefarious intent. He was a rawboned, hard-bitten wolf, but his smallish stature and unimpressive bearing suggested he shouldn’t have been capable of such savagery. He was only marginally aware of Moorhen’s presence and did not speak or slow or stop until she commanded him to, or the slippery sea lion stopped its wild thrashing — whichever came first. In the tense, waiting stillness that followed, he shrank back, licking blood from his lips, painted with garish streaks of crimson. “Wh-Where?” he rumbled weakly. “Where is h-h-h-home?”

The raven had only a moment to feel insulted by the male's disregard before the promise of blood spurred her into action. She was a few steps behind her uncle, still trying to get over the fact that he was here, he was smaller than her, they were hunting - 

- and then there was no more room for thought, and the two Cairns were tearing into their prey, each burning through their own set of emotions. Moorhen, at least, remained aware of their surroundings, and began to drag the flailing sea lion away from its ilk, her uncle still attached to the other side and seeming to fight her every step of the way. But soon enough, there was space between them and the masses, and the sea lion was still between them, and Moorhen couldn't drag her eyes away from his familiar face - so different than she thought she'd remembered!

"Undersea," she replied, the word pulled from her almost automatically. She wondered for a moment if that was something she wanted the male to know, disturbed as he was - but he was her uncle. He was family, and of course she had to tell him. Of course she had to bring him home. "Szymon - Uncle? You will come with me?" she asked breathlessly, licking the blood from her muzzle in a sudden fit of nerves. "Come to islann? For home together?"

Undersea, she said. Not Blackrock Depths. Not Warsaw. Szymon’s ears flattened against his head, and he jerked his muzzle askance to sunder the uneasy confederation of their locked eyes, his incisors clipping anxiously at the fur along his elbow. If Moorhen’s tentative use of “uncle” threw him for a loop, the only indication was an uneasy flicker of one tattered ear. “There is no h-h-home,” he informed her in a cool, calm voice. He bowed his head and curled in upon himself, his tail sweeping to clasp his hip; without speaking, he ceded the kill to the banded raven and in this way submitted to her demands. If she wanted him to go to the island, he would go — not with any particular pleasure or joy, but with absolute obedience. His wife and children were gone; there was no reason for him to demur. “Okay,” he acquiesced more eloquently, fastening his teeth upon the scabbed flesh of his tail.

To Moorhen's untrained ears, his words were more a declaration that Undersea was unfit to be a home than that he was unfit to have a home. "Lukk horen din munn!" she snapped, taking a sharp step toward him. It is all I have, she wanted to say, but instead she simply curled her lip and turned her head away, her heart pounding unsteadily in her chest as she worked through her anger, her growing urge to give into the hysterics she felt coming on.

But when he moved to bite his tail, her voice soften at once. "Do not," she urged, moving forward a tiny step, closing only inches between them before coming again to a halt. Could she touch him? Would he disappear into a loud of soot and salt? "Please, I am sorry. I do not growl," she wheedled, tail flickering uneasily. "Eat food. Come to islann. We will be home. I will mek home for you."

Moorhen’s ire surprised Szymon, but his response was surprisingly muted given his typical propensity for violence. Tattered ears flattened against his skull, and the bridge of his muzzle wrinkled briefly as a low rumble churned discontentedly in his throat, but he kept to a stony silence. She was probably just hungry — Doe always snapped when she was hungry. His rawboned musculature tensed when the seawolf approached him, muzzle dipping low as a sliver of whalebone white crept into his eye, but he unfurled his tongue and settled his flews over the curl of serrated cutlery as he sullenly relinquished his grip on his tail. “You c-c-can g-growl,” he informed her grumpily. She was a woman, but she was not Leokadia or Ksenia; he did not fear her. She was only waspish, her moods heightened by her season. Doe had been the same.

A flicker of irritation rose in his gut. Didn’t she get it? He didn’t want her to make a home for him. His home was leagues beneath the surface, miles away, in the heart of a woman who didn’t want him — had no use for him. You didn’t come back from that. You didn’t find a new home. You died where you stood. But he was tired, and hungry, and he didn’t want to argue with her. He didn’t want her to use that tone on him, a wheedling, anxious, eager-to-please entreat that he instantaneously abhorred: “T-T-Tell me what to d-d-d-do,” he told her plainly.

“What do you w-w-want.”

He was the same, no matter what she did. And Moorhen had not drawn back from his show of teeth, but she drew back from this: the wall of silence, the colorless words, the lack of any emotion but tired. Tell me what to do, he said - and it seemed like a lot of people were asking that of her, lately. Tell me what to do and What do you want?

I WANT YOU TO LOVE ME, she wanted to scream, her lips twitching as she contemplated letting those words out. They were beating against her chest, her teeth, hard and quick in her temples. But she held her tongue, afraid that this would get no reaction, either. She just had to keep on believing that he was tired, he was sad, he just needed some time...

"We will go to islann, now," she said in a falsely jaunty voice, turning away from his terrible, stony visage and looking back toward Undersea. The sea lion laid dead beside them, but Moorhen wasn't hungry anymore. Food was the furthest thing from her mind.

He’d told her to command him, but the forced note of cheer in her voice was so high and false, he balked immediately. “No,” he grumbled, and got to his feet, moving tentatively toward the kill. If she did not gainsay him, his muzzle would dip and his jaws would part, lapping at the run of blood at the pinniped’s throat. “Eat,” he muttered flatly, and whether he’d intended it as a command or an explanation was anybody’s guess. He tore through the thick blubber, steeping his muzzle in blood until the mask of crimson reached his eyes, and feasted like a creature starved; at this point, any attempts to move him or drive him away would have been for naught. It was only when he’d sated his own hunger that he stepped around to the creature’s belly and tore a messy incision, excising the stillwarm viscera and dropping it with roughhewn tenderness at her paws. “Eat,” he repeated, maybe a bit uncomfortably, a crick in his tail and a jagged knot in his spine confessing that whatever he’d done to offend her, he was sorry — and he would make it up to her, if she allowed it.

Moorhen's ears flipped back in displeasure when he denied her, and she was about to order him to the island more forcefully and in a far less friendly manner when he descended on their forgotten (to her) meal. Which was fine, she supposed - the male looked as though he could do with a good meal - but she was still grumpy at being disobeyed, even if she (ostensibly) rather wished Szymon would take the lead at this point.

Not sure what else to do, she sat and watched while he gorged himself, and began to feel her own hunger return to her. Enough that, when Szymon gifted her a pile of organs with an inelegant splat!, only a beat passed (during which she eyed her uncle half-tenderly, half-hopeful) before she descended ravenously upon the steaming meal. And if it were possible to eat and contemplate at the same time, she would've been thinking, Boy, this seems like a good sign! He gave me some organs. Organs = love and sanity. But it was not possible. Not for Moorhen.

Finally, she lifted her head, her own features as bloodied as his - though it showed rather less on her dark coat. "Now to islann," she ordered, and the steel in her eyes dared him to argue again.

She wasn’t Doe, but she was eating what he gave her and ordering him around, and that was so familiar, so deeply ingrained, that he settled into it almost immediately. He wasn’t in good spirits. Szymon rarely was, anymore. But he was restored enough that he fixed her with a gimlet eye, testing her briefly, before a roll of one lean, angular shoulder served as a noncommittal lupine shrug. “Okay,” he acquiesced, his scabby tail flicking once in a sad little pantomime of a wag. He wasn’t so sure about this island. From the sound of it, it belonged to Moorhen — and that was good and right, given her birthright — but the scent of others lingered on her fur, and he couldn’t help the stab of defensiveness (possessiveness?) that drummed from his heart down to the tips of his toes, the roots of his teeth.

Luckily for them both, Szymon did not voice his question. If he had, Moorhen would've been happy to talk about her various packmates (especially Coelacanth) and about how Titmouse and Driftwood had been bringing her gifts and playing with her lately, how weird was that? And she probably would've talked about Driftwood's strange behavior with Teleklos in that thread that hasn't happened at this point in Moorhen's timeline, but I've just decided that this is probably the most recent thing that has happened to her.

Anyway.

Plunging into the icy water, the two Cairns fought their way back to Undersea, Moorhen in the lead. Although she often got the urge to glance over her shoulder to make sure Szymon was still there, she did her best to keep her focus up ahead and let him battle the waves on his own. As soon as they reached the beach, though, she turned back, fluttering almost anxiously around him as she tried to process what was happening, what she'd done: Szymon was on Coelacanth's island. Her sanctuary. And she wasn't at all sure it was safe for him to be there. Safe for her pack mates for him to be there.

She tipped back her head and almost called for Coelacanth. But then she thought of Aditya and decided - she'd tell her later. For now, she'd get Szymon settled somewhere safe. Somewhere out-of-the-way.

"Come," she said stiffly, setting off for the wood pile.

Three hundred for you. ♥

Let me know and I can change this to whatever date is best before I archive!

Szymon had gorged himself, but the thought of leaving such a fine kill behind still rankled; a brushfire of ginger-tipped hackles rippled to life across his withers and down his spine. The old Cairn arrogance warred with his natural inclination to claim only the lowest rung of any given hierarchy — she had commanded him, “Come,” her voice imperious, but he was not her pet. His golden gaze flickered uneasily from Moorhen’s chin to the thick, rich meat, and then he threw himself down upon it, rolling and rolling until all that fine white fur was painted a garish red that appeared black in the waning light. As he left it, he lifted his leg and marked it with a stream of urine — not a very impressive scent signature, honestly, given his loner status.

He plunged into the icy water after Moorhen, surfed ashore, and though his flanks streamed pinkishly as he blew saline from his nostrils, he appeared oddly serene. For a moment, he took in the surroundings, and when he bent to sniff at the trunk of a nearby tree, there was a twinge of…some distant familiarity. He couldn’t place it, though, and dismissed it as unimportant. The wood pile claimed his full attention, then. It was a splendid work of architecture — and LORT, he knew a thing or two about architecture. I mean, did you see the rock thing that Doe and Skellige had him make? Carefully, “It is nice,” he complimented, and maybe a ghost of the old warmth flickered beneath the roughened gravel of his baritone. His voice had been beautiful once, but the music had died when Doe had left him.