Golden Glade as embers dress the sky

"Hey, @Eshe," Rannoch called to his youngest, his voice soft. "Let's do something together, today, okay?" It had been some time since he had been alone with his daughter, and he was eager to hear how she had been settling in. 

Leading Eshe outside, Rannoch paused once they stood on the den's doorstep. "You know, Deshyr and I discovered a flower field. Do you want to check that out?"

To put things shortly: Eshe was not fond of change, and she was even less fond of losing siblings. Breccan's continued absence had driven the young girl to withdraw into a shell of stubborn silence and seclusion, but a personal call from her Papa wasn't something she was yet capable of ignoring.

Padding up rather daintily to Rannoch's side, Eshe sat down and looked up at her towering idol; hitting him squarely with a pair of melting sandlewood eyes. (An effect she created by thinking of her knight in shining armor, Gannet, and how she'd never see him again.) "D'you think we could go see the flowers at Lost Creek instead?" she entreated, thinking this to be a crafty way to make it back to her usual stomping grounds.

"That would be better for us to do, I think. And we won't even have to stay long, Papa, we could just come right back— I promise!" Her silver tail wagged in short, excited spurts in the dirt— her actions caught somewhere between trying to be adult-serious and flat-out begging; tactics often employed at different moments, never the same.

Note: THE JOYS OF PARENTHOOD!

Eshe's enthusiasm was heartbreaking to Rannoch; he wished that he didn't have to be the bearer of bad news. "You know we can't do that, sweetie," his voice was sympathetic as he spoke. "As much as I wish we could, we aren't allowed back there... Mama and I told you this, remember?" 

With a gentle exhale, Rannoch attempted to counter Eshe's appeal. "The flower field here is pretty neat—I think you'll like, sweetie. If I remember correctly, there are even those purple flowers from the Hollow that you really like."

Rannoch crushed his daughter, but he did so gently.

And Eshe suddenly felt like she was being suffocated with a very soft, breathable pillow.

"Okay," she huffed, having obviously known her plea was a last-ditch effort at something impossible. Her enthusiasm had deflated into the negatives, but she still wanted to be around her Papa. No present amount of childhood trauma was going to change that. "But are you sure they're the same ones? Because we came really, really far from Lost Creek, and flowers don't walk... so it's impossible, right?"

She'd just learned the word "impossible" and was determined to use it as often and as dramatically as possible.

As Eshe acknowledged defeat, Rannoch gently touched the tip of her ear with his snout. "We'll have fun," he promised before he pulled himself back to full-height.

Disbelief was then poised, as Eshe questioned the legitimacy of the flowers, and Rannoch couldn't help but feel amused. "There's a chance that they could be the same ones," he answered. "Somebody once told me that flower seeds could travel on the wind. So, if that's the case, there's a chance that some flowers shed their seeds, and those seeds found their way over here." 

"Do you think that happened?" Rannoch prompted, quirking his head in curiosity.

Eshe frowned softly as Rannoch made his promises. She wasn't entirely certain she believed him. After all, he and Liffey both had promised she'd be happy here and that had yet to be the case. His comment about the seeds did intrigue her, though. To that, her ears perked a little and her expression lightened as she swiftly became more fascinated than she was sullen. The idea of seeds traveling all the way across the world (her world beginning in the Hollow and ending here in the Glade, of course) was mind-blowing, and thus she immediately began to debunk it with her scientific little brain.

It took her a while of pondering this new possibility before she was willing to respond to her father's question. In the end, she reasoned that if she and her family were capable of traveling that far, then there was no reason flower seeds couldn't do the same. So, she eventually gave a curt nod to her papa and admitted, "I suppose it's not impossible," she stressed again, unable to withhold a little smile of pleasure that she'd managed to use her fancy word again.

Her disposition placated for now, Eshe went on to allow Rannoch to lead the way to find these flowers that he insisted existed, eager to discover if they were the same ones.