Wheeling Gull Isle maybe it’s not the moon at all

Backdated to April 8, 2018. Takes place the evening of this thread. @Komodo ♥

The selkie’s daughter threaded her way through Rainsong Labyrinth on nimble, knowing paws, making for the maw to the north that opened to the sea. A heavy sense of dread gathered within her breast like a confederacy of low-slung nimbostratus clouds, reducing her sprightly gait to a hangdog slink — she regretted, and fiercely, that she had allowed so much time to pass without talking to the Earthstalker and rekindling their closeness. Things had been so busy with the second coming of Undersea, and Seelie had been admittedly wrapped up in Stockholm and Moorhen, and Komodo’s silent endurance had allowed her to fool herself into believing he was happy to be here and distant only because of his communion with his gods. Now she felt guilty, and a little stupid.

At the back of her mind, she hoped that Driftwood was settling in well — that Hemlock was safely bedded down with her children — that Faeryn and Stockholm shared her sense of pride and fulfillment about what they had accomplished thus far. She wondered about Moorhen, hoping that the girl was happy here and not remaining simply to keep the sheepdog company. She worried about her twin and about Catori, whose time was drawing near [she had no way of knowing that the Spiritwalker’s children were already born]. She didn’t worry about Brontide, Serein, and Sirimiri quite so much, for they were accustomed to journeying, but Amoxtli — oh, Oxtli! —

…but it was Komodo who occupied the fine wirings of the sheepdog’s psyche now. She had wronged the honey-tongued medicine man with her distance, and she wanted to make things right.

the thread title!!

He hadn’t gone far, after their meeting with Driftwood, but the earthstalker did return home to his caverns — it was only a short jaunt away. Here, there was great evidence of his dwelling: tucked up inside the mouth, a stash of curios and collections; farther back, the bed where he slept, made of fragrant spring leaves; a bone here and a bone there, either from a meal or a ceremony. It was here that Komodo spent most of his time, murmuring to spirits and seeking their guidance. It had become sacred.

He had immediately set upon a particularly large bone; something from the caches. The brute grasped it between his forelimbs and ground away at it with his molars, trying to relieve some of the tension that lingered after their communion with the newcomer — but it was not frustration with their newest pack member that continued to plague him. It was that damned little dog, with her tufted ears and twinkle in her eyes, and how she taunted him with her very existence. It was difficult to quell the restlessness, even after the girl had left, taking her lovely sweet scent with her. The mottled medicine man felt utterly besotted —  he did not like the circumstances. 

The bone splintered beneath the pressure of his jaws and he flung it away from him, exhaling sharply. Then, he looked up to see Coelacanth, a chiaroscuro figure painted against the light of the cavern’s awning mouth. He shifted his weight, coming high onto his elbows like a lion. Without wasting time, Komodo spoke to her honestly. “It’s hard t’see you with ‘im,” he spoke of Stockholm in a voice twinged with an effortless sadness, spoken as if he had dripping honeycomb in place of vocal chords. What had he expected — did Komodo really think it would be him? Him to lead the pack and bed the queen and stay in one place, happily, forever and ever? Probably not — definitely not — and he wanted his friends to be happy, for he truly loved them — but did they have to be happy together? 

Knowing he could not get what he wanted [for once], the medicine man gave the sheepdog a discontented look and picked up another bone.    

Coelacanth loved the Labyrinth. She immersed herself into its endless soundscape of singing water and dancing light, her eyes on the northern seas and the pale luminescence of the stars. The tension began to melt from her lithe musculature — but it gathered up again at the sound of Komodo’s voice, balling in her gut like a bad case of indigestion and closing vicelike around her lungs. She hopped to her feet and whirled around, pinning him with a pained and pensive stare. She must have walked right past him, which wasn’t altogether surprising; she liked sometimes to walk the Rainsong blind, particularly when she was troubled. All the confusion and distress she felt mingled and tangled with the discontent Komodo felt; he spoke softly but his body language screamed it in the disgruntled grind of his teeth, the brusque gesture of his head as he flung the useless shard of bone away, the heavy slap of his paw as he drew another bone toward him, and most of all, the clash of his fiery eyes against her own. For the first time, Seelie feared the Earthstalker — and though logically she had every right to assert herself, she froze.

The Aralez was an intelligent creature, but she was not typically classed as cunning or calculating. She knew immediately that Komodo was speaking of Stockholm, not Driftwood; and she did not cut her stare even as her Neptune eyes glossed with tears from the effort of holding it. She watched him like a rabbit in the yellow spotlight of an oncoming car, like a deer in the crosshairs of a hunter’s rifle. Her spine straightened. “D-Driftwood?” she whispered, her tongue tripping on the first syllable and its myriad of difficult consonants, playing dumb, a strange, hot miasma roiling in her breast. If the Angakkuq was going to speak ill of her mate or her marriage — even in a roundabout way — she wanted to hear him do so by name. This was also the only “out” Komodo would receive. He had the chance to drop the blazing coal of a topic — but if Coelacanth knew him as well as she thought she did, he wouldn’t. The Earthstalker had always been plain-speaking and blunt; it was one of the things she liked about him, and one of the reasons she sought his council.

All the irritation she’d felt during the awkward meeting between herself, Driftwood, and Komodo came rushing back to the forefront. She understood that some of the seawolves would be more possessive and headstrong when meeting new wolves, but she deeply resented Komodo’s proclamation that she was “head honcho” — that the flotsam upon her shores didn’t get to ask questions. She didn’t want to be perceived that way! Naively, she wanted to be loved, not feared.

*throws komodo’s 100th post at you and runs*

She only needed to say that one word, and Komodo immediately understood the game she was playing at. Let her play the fool, if it suit her. Perhaps Seelie would have been fine — nay, entirely too happy — to forget any of the wanton tension that ever existed between them; from the magnetism that dripped from every delicate syllable that fell from her nascent tongue, to the way he attended and bolstered her without questions, seemingly without reason; but he had not the restraint, never had before and especially did not not at that moment.

The young seraph might be all too happy to ignore it, to swallow it and deny it while she continued to bestow her affections upon others directly in front of him, as if it had never mattered, but it was as present for him now as it had ever been. Perhaps more-so. 

The roan shaman held her plucky gaze for a restrained, taciturn moment. He gave a reproving chuckle, a short noise that lingered deep in the pit on his throat — then, he cut off with his single-worded response. “No.” No, it was not Driftwood of which he spoke and it was almost laughable, that he might be threatened by the waifish, nervous thing they had picked up beachside… but it might as well have been true. He had wished to be Driftwood as he played with Coelacanth on the wet sands, just as he wished to be the Morningside wolves as they were bestowed with the girl’s love and familial affections, just as he wished to shepherd the girl through the vicissitudes of leadership [the gampr upheld that particular honor].

Unfortunately, the earthstalker was a man not as confident as the mask he wore — instead, he cultivated an inflated sense of avarice to fill and distract from that void. With the sheepdog in her spiced state, it simmered far too hot in his belly. His smelted gaze held strong, almost level with her own as his large physique reclined and her featherlight frame stood straight, and he silently dared her to not speak of it still. He fully expected her to respond; and oh, how he wondered.

She tried.

She tried, but she couldn’t compete with the limitless fire of his unflinching stare. Coelacanth wrenched her gaze away from the Earthstalker’s with a stuttering breath that might have dissolved into a sob if she held no audience and could allow herself such weakness. Before Komodo, though, she spent it on a frustrated huff. Her Neptune eyes glittered with ire seldom aroused, but it was clear she did not consider herself dethroned. Feathered tail swept high and proud, a scythe-like banner above her squarely set hips and back; finely drawn head lifted; and tufted ears strained forward upon her velveteen crown. The bridge of her fox-fine muzzle wrinkled as she gathered the frayed scraps of everything she wanted to say and flung them at him in an inelegant rush.

“Modo, you — you, no — ” The words hiccupped and jolted from her in uneven spurts. “Am not your b-breed-bitch — nor daughter — ” Oh! She hated the roughhewn sound of it. She hated that she could only whisper when the tension in her muscles made her want to shout. “No claim!” she cried at last, the silk of her winnowing whisper-whine knifed and knotted with strife. The sound might as well have been a weak cough for all the sound it possessed, but Seelie herself was as eloquent as an actress in a silent film. Her hackles were up, rippling down her spine like a cresting wave, and her tail lashed like a furious housecat’s. Just who did he think he was? Why should he think that her desire and willingness to cuddle with him equated any kind of currency?

“No claim — my love, mine!” she tacked on. The atramentous ingénue believed, perhaps erroneously, that Stockholm had been fully aware of what he had taken on when he’d agreed to keep her. Seelie’s love was too free, too boundless, to be contained. What made the Gampr different from the other males in his Groenendael’s life was choice. In another life, perhaps she could have loved Aditya or Komodo the same way she loved the Volkodav — but the giving of herself had already been done. She had chosen to tether herself to Stockholm and he had chosen to do likewise, and no matter who she cuddled with or romped with, no matter who she hunted with or led with, he alone was her mate. It was in his very large prints that she would place her very small paws — and when spring rose at last from her hibernal bed, it was his children she would bear.

Though her words where few and whispered, she might as well have been yelling for all the anger it evoked from him. The earthstalker watched her, gilded eyes flashing, as she huffed and raised her hackles at him, about as threatening as a kitten would be — and she continued to deny it. A single snort signaled his true displeasure at this; for now she was not just playing, she was outright denying him.

Komodo did, however, take solace in the fact that this topic seemed to deeply unseat Coelacanth as well, so that she might get even a taste of what she put him through; even in her denial, the type of energy that emanated from her was nothing short of delicious, and he wanted more.

The inflamed spirit within him threw him lurching to his feet and, resembling something more like a domineering lion or a simmering tiger, he immediately drew nearer. His movement lighted and heavy with purpose, as was the brute’s voice when he spoke. “You dare —” he breathed, then checked his anger mid-sentence — this was Seelie, and she did not truly deserve his rage. He did not know why this moment, over all other moments, he felt the need to give his opinions voice; but still his passions leapt up in his throat, and still he had things to say, and she needed to listen to them. The man drew in breath, pressed his ears hotly against his head, and began a small interrogation.  “No claim?” He cut his gaze.

“Ah claimed yah th’day yah washed up’on the beach.”

Whether or not that was the truth, that was at least a little part of the way he saw things. He had plucked her from the hands of god's wrath, and brought her back from her feralness — who were the others that had helped? had there been any others? did they even matter? The only thing that mattered was that he was still here, had always been there — even when she was merely a cub — and he would always be here. He deserved her. “Then yuh chose… him.” Though his words still came out hot and angry, his words belied his true sadness at this.

The Earthstalker lurched to his feet and drew near with a seething, leonine tread; the roll of shoulder and hip beneath his agouti pelt, limned by the soft blue glow of the Labyrinth, seemed at once languid and electrically charged. The nearer he got, the smaller Coelacanth seemed by comparison, but she held her ground, drawing her tiny body up as straight as she could, a simmering growl undulating in her throat. In Seelie the sound was muted, but it echoed upon the labradorite walls and redoubled, and inwardly she found herself impressed by the acoustics. Velveteen flews twitched and quivered spasmodically as she defiantly ground out, “I am Aralez. I dare.”

His nearness was both alluring and off-putting to her in her hormonal state; she saw him differently now, in a light she could not un-see — a virile, dominant male the likes of which had always won her loyalties before. Beneath the veneer of power, though, there was Komodo — her Komodo, gentle and nurturing and kind. Roughhewn, sure, but a good wolf at the core.

Mindful of her love and respect for him, Coelacanth, wrapped in the tendrils of the Angakkuq’s fury and feverish with the embers of her own discontent, tried to soften the vicious clench of her tightly wound musculature — to settle her curling lips into a neutral mien — but then he spoke.

“Ah claimed yah th’day yah washed up’on the beach.”

Even the sound of singing water seemed to pause for a prolonged beat. Only when the sheepdog recovered from her shock and started to breathe again at an accelerated rate did the surrounding soundscape seem to resume its lyrical pitter-patter. “No,” she said before he could utter his next statement, but even the insinuation that Komodo might have been a better, fairer choice than Stockholm went unmentioned. This was about Seelie now. She ghosted forward a pace or two until they were only inches apart, and threw her Neptune gaze out like a fishing net; she dared his fiery eyes to surface and be ensnared, and she breathed with fierce finality:

“Never.”

Well, at least now it was out in the open — Komodo hadn’t thought he’d need to say anything about their weird relationship dynamics. It was something implicitly understood by both parties: Seelie loved, and Komodo protected, and it was something uncomplicated and innocent by nature. But now the spiced sheepdog stood here, when it really counted, telling him that he couldn’t cash in and that was, well…

That was frustrating. 

Why did she have to make things so complicated, by saying no?  Couldn’t she just make things easy, for once? It could all be so good, and it was all right here — if she would only just. reach. out. and. take. it. As if she had read his mind and wanted to displease him by further complicating things, she stalked towards him, her entire mien bright and flaring, an empty growl rolling in her throat. Komodo unintentionally held his breath as the selkie’s daughter came towards him, incited and provoked, challenging him with both rank and physical demonstration. What would Riptide and Crosscurrent say to see them like this, so heated and impassioned; two steadfast forces facing off, so close that their breaths intertwined and danced in the dewy subterranean air. Would they have ever guessed?

The earthstalker kept his gaze firmly down his snout and grasping towards her bejeweled cerulean depths, feisty and sparkling like the high tide itself; but soon he relented and broke their bestial stonewalling, letting his eyes close and head turn away. He did so with sincerity, as he felt rather wounded at her muted proclamation. “Y’didn’t… Y’never?” the shaman questioned, not exactly sure he wanted to be the one to fill in the words,  all the details that Coelacanth left out. He didn’t want to understand, but he did.

He slowly released his exhale, trying to encourage his pathos to yield to logos through the controlling of breath, but the techniques that usually kept him placid suddenly lost their efficacy. “Yuh never felt… he repeated, letting the last syllable drawl on, not sure what words could easily surmise what she was supposed to have felt. Then, his thickset jaw snapped shut. He snorted in indignation. Komodo was never one to force his attentions on another did not want it and, even snared by Seelie’s subtle heat scent, he could see that she did not feel the say way — and, apparently, never had. Now who was the bad guy, here?

“Yer a fuckin’ tease.” he spat, calling a spade a spade.

The selkie’s daughter was seething, but she was also terribly confused — she and Amoxtli had met the Earthstalker when they were only six months old, fine-boned and shy, with oversized ears and plush puppy coats. Early on and ever since, Komodo had been afforded a lofty pedestal on which to stand, but until this moment Seelie had been blind to his masculinity in many ways. It wasn’t willfully done. She regarded him as a mentor and a confidant, a protector and a healer — a treasured member of her family! She just didn’t think of him that way, and when he wrenched his gaze away from hers and twice sought confirmation of this truth, she answered him honestly:

“No, Modo.”

The heavy thunderclap of his jaws and the indignant snort that followed shocked and frightened her — tufted ears snapped defensively back, then sprang to attention — but she did not truly start to hurt until he spat at her, the uncouth language ringing against the walls of the Labyrinth and echoing mockingly around her: “fuckin’ tease, fuckin’ tease, fuckin’ tease…”

A roil of emotion, thick and frightening, welled up in her — she wanted to hip check him right in the jaw or grab the bridge of his frowning muzzle in her teeth — but she merely stood her ground, cerulean eyes limpid and luminous in the crepuscular maze. She said nothing aloud, but huffed a soft, exasperated sigh. Visibly ruffled, she reached desperately within herself for the wellspring of compassion she depended so heavily on and drained it to the dregs. Quill-like hackles smoothed, though she still stood stiff-legged and unmoving before her erstwhile champion. A wispy whine like a peace offering danced upon her lips. “Modo…” she breathed with infinite gentleness.

“You lie,” came her frail rejoinder in a silky susurrus, for teasing was a deliberate, malicious act, and she had committed no such crime! With utter disregard for her own personal safety, she made to touch her nose to his thickly-furred cheek and the stubborn clench of his jaw. “Do you — h-hope — ” her words were slow and measured, but not without error, “ — do you wish to leaf Undersea?” Her manner of asking was not threatening, though the words could have been taken as such, especially given the inflammatory nature of their conversation. She soldiered on, though:

“Unheppy here?”

She called him a liar, but he knew he was not. He wasn’t sure of whatever this was, he knew he was not a liar; he did not make it up. Perhaps it had been in the gentle strum of her maw against his, or in the way she fit so perfectly beside him, or in her other small tokens and gestures [the ones that mattered so much to him but were apparently so infinitesimal to Coelacanth], but it had been there — always there, and always when he needed it. Could she not see how badly he needed it now? Did she not burn the way he burned? It’s like you don’t even know, he mused, wondering if someone could be so innocent as to truly not see their own salacious, feminine wiles and the spell they cast upon others — but if anyone could it, it was Coelacanth. The Vedmak sighed and opened his honeypot eyes, beseeching her for everything, something, absolutely anything at all… even if it was just her pity.

The fight had gone out of the girl. It was the same with Komodo so he listened, browbeaten, as she voiced an idea that was not even close to the meaning he had been grasping for. She asked him if she wanted to leave and nosed his cheek. He hardened his jaw and grit his teeth, for nothing if not to keep the words from coming out — words like yes, free me and no, I will literally never leave you — and, this time, he successfully tempered himself. Well, if that had been the conclusion that she had come to, then he would clearly need to change his approach.

“Naw kitten, ‘ah don’t wanna leave,” he rollicked with a ghost of a smile upon his lips. Love and lovemaking had always been devotional acts for the earthen angakkuq. Their union was clearly the will of the gods; it was why he had been thrust upon the storm battered atoll in the first place; it was why he left and it was why he returned all those months later; and now it was why she stood before him all sweet-scented and demanded things of him that he did not want to do — things like restrain himself — and it was all very confusing, because if he was not supposed to do the thing, then why would the gods place her in his path time and time again? Why then — why, with her, was it how it was with no one else… Not with any of the woman of his past, and not even the ones who bore his children. Why?

The brute looked solemnly at her, somehow drunken and stone-cold sober at the same time. “Ah’ve just neva been good at… stayin…” Komodo admitted, slowly, honestly. It was an admission that surprised no one, surely. His propensity towards vagrancy was likely what prompted Seelie to hint at his departure in the first place, as she had many times before — this part of him, she knew well. She knew that he didn’t leave because he wanted to, he left because he had to. It was his god given task to voyage and pass on information and exchange knowledge and culture like currency. He knew that Seelie, of everyone, understood that — so it must be that she also understood just what he was willing to sacrifice. "But ah want to,” he said after a long, gravid silence.

“Because ah want you.”

It was at this point that Komodo could no longer check his desires and he pushed forward to close the 2 or 3 inches that existed between them. The brute’s nose, mouth, eyes — hell, his entire face was veritably buried in the girl’s silken décolletage, breathing her scent as if he could simply inhale her and that would be the panacea to his every worry and woe. He could not see her as well as her wished he could in the lowlight of the caverns, but it afforded them a sort of anonymity that perhaps emboldened him. What he could not see with his eyes, he made sure to explore with the length of his body as he pressed hotly against her. “I want…” his breathed his lascivious words into the crux of her silken ear, nibbling upon her tendrils as if they were the sweetest cotton candy.

“I need…”

Coelacanth awaited the Earthstalker’s reply with steel in her spine and stars in her eyes — and when at last it came, she met it with suspicion. She longed to melt bonelessly into the comfort of that rollicking, reassuring burr — but she could not forget how fiercely he had lashed out at her mere moments before. The serrated edge of his foulmouthed accusation still stung, skimming along each nerve like a whetted razor. If he did not want to leave, what did he want? Vigilantly, she searched the Angakkuq’s face, weighing each of his words with a critical ear. She nodded at his admission — it was a simple fact, a law of nature, that Komodo couldn’t be kept, couldn’t be tied down — but cocked her head sharply in unfeigned bewilderment when he confessed he wanted to.

Because he wanted her.

In mere minutes, he had infuriated her, frightened her, confused her, and hurt her. Where was her protector now? How could Komodo ever hope to heal these wounds? It was the first time Coelacanth could ever remember his touch being utterly repugnant to her, but the pound of her blood craved the physical contact, even as it warred with her unspoken lack of consent. Tufted ears folded meekly against the gentle slope of her crown and it seemed for a moment that he might tame her — she trembled as he buried his great head within the feathered hollow of her décolletage, but did not flee outright. “I want…” he begged, pressing boldly against her, taking liberties she had not afforded him; and, “No,” she breathed, her lips and teeth chattering together.

His mouth was at her ear now, nibbling hotly at the wisps of feathery fur as fine as dragon beard candy. “I need…” he offered in a husky murmur, and a whine stirred timorously in her throat as something warm and foreign curled tautly in her lower abdomen. The throb in her bloodstream was a heady pulse that drummed from the tips of her ears to the pads of her paws. I want, I need, I want, I need… The fluttering banner of her tail tick-tocked slowly like an unbalanced pendulum —

— hesitated, sweeping low and arcing sinister —

“— stop!”

It was not Stockholm’s face that swam before her but Komodo’s, at his intractable, volatile worst. He didn’t get to touch her — not after he had challenged her, insulted her, and hurt her. That her affection was being used in such a way — that she was being toyed with like a mountain cat’s prey! — wounded her and cracked the obelisk upon which he stood. The Earthstalker came crashing down before her, and she saw him fully, not a perfect, infallible being but simply a man, flawed and lonely and hungry. Her feathered tail clamped between her thighs and she whipped her head to the side, angling her muzzle so that if she made contact with his skull, she would do so painfully, with the scythelike profile of her upper canine. In the same fluid motion, she snapped at him with glaring intent, baring every tooth in her fox-fine muzzle as she made to hip check him and skitter away.

He had only several seconds of such bliss before it came screeching to a halt. At first the damsel did not resist and he leaned into the invitation fully; his tail cocked to the side and draped over her gamine hips, his hackles stirred as he became taller and sought to cloak both of them with his being, both acts rather possessive gestures in their own right and perhaps obscenely out of place here — not that the miasma of effeminate hormones would let him see that — but the inkdark harpy met his advances with a shriek. It was not the reaction he had sought.

“— stop!”

Not only that, but she turned her visage to him and struck hard, cracking against his crown with the side of her perfectly-crafted fang. Komodo grunted as his skull smarted and, as solid as an obelisk, steeled himself in the case that there were more kittenish affronts to follow. Komodo was not a trained warrior, but pain was rather sacrosanct to him; he had self-inflicted much worse than this, and thus he was quick to recover. What was also quick to recover was his surly irascibility, which jumped up and out of him in a mad sort of way, a way that he only felt when in the throes of chant and worship, or when he seek to sate his bloodthirst with a hunt. The brute imagined taking her right there, not with her blessing and not for her pleasure — just to simply dominate her and show her where the real power lie; with him, and with him only. 

The at which game she played — it was over. 

But in the end, Komodo did nothing; never would have done anything. His imagination played at fantasies that would never materialize: it was what allowed him to be a great shaman, but not necessarily the best realist. Beneath whatever this was [what he would soon realize to be Seelie’s season], the angaqquk had the utmost respect for the little doe-eyed creature and he knew he could not shatter the relationship they had… or, whatever was left of it. How could he serve her best if he were expunged from Undersea’s rankings — how was that the best outcome of this? What would it all have been for? With anger licking at his tongue, he restrained him and chewed the word before he let it roll careless off his tongue. “Whatever,” he said, eager to cut this interaction short and stop it where it was. Until he was able to pray, or cleanse himself, or sober up, their conversation should not move forth. Only bad things would come of it, he was certain.

Komodo did not wait for her to reply and incite him to further action. Even though the caves were, in essence, his dwelling, the man exited in a rush of mottled limbs and left the Aralez to the loneliness that she so sought.   

Rainsong Labyrinth had been her place once. Hers and Moorhen’s.

Coelacanth crumpled in the rubble of Komodo’s incensed exodus, nursing wounds no wolf could see; she tucked her nose firmly into her feathered plume and trembled spasmodically. Had she been able, the inkdark Aralez would have loosed a litany of keening cries — but her anguish was locked beneath the weight of her tuneless throat and every lonely lyric died aborning. She felt the blind wanting of her body and the fierce weeping of her heart in equal measure and it manifested itself in an overwhelming case of allodynia that kept her from moving for some time. Even the singing water around her was painful in its own way. She loved it here — she loved it! — but the blue sanctuary was profaned by what had occurred, and she dragged herself away. Her gait was choppy and stiff as she emerged gingerly from the glowing maze and limp-staggered south in an uneven zigzag.

When she reached the edge of the Southern Strand, Coelacanth looked back over her shoulder to where Moorhen and Stockholm waited. What would they say if they knew what she had done? She believed wholeheartedly that somehow, this was all her fault — she had broken something that could not ever be fully repaired, but, by all the fish in the sea, she didn’t know how she’d done it! “Bad dog?” she asked her reflection in the water, stretching out on her belly and pillowing her chin on her paws to stare at the water-rippled rendition of herself. She didn’t look any different, so why was Komodo acting like she was someone she wasn’t? Maybe she was stupid after all — the woman had said as much when Seelie’d tried to alert her of intruders and pepper her face with kisses.

She stared at herself and loathed what she saw until she could bear her self-flagellation no longer. She wanted to be away from here — so, on aching paws, she crossed the sandbar.