Ankyra Sound you were swept ashore like bottles holding prayers

the singeing sun beat upon this place bereft of dignity. memories swirled in a windfall of pain as the ivory yearling refamiliarized himself with each grain of sand, each grimacing shuck--evoking hidden emotion. Lycaon picked along the strand with reservations and a lingering ache that instilled sorrow upon his countenance. 

"mana!! look!" the young boy gawked wanderously, racing towards a colossal red cedar that had washed upon their shore, courtesy of the gale-force winds the night before. it dwarfed him in size, like a felled titan. Caiaphas meandered after him as he struggled (with great enthusiasm to his merit) to clamber up it's rotted timber, and lobbed him up with the bridge of her nose so he could reach the top. he hastily barreled to its very end, nearly throwing himself off in the process. "i tan see DA ENTIWER WOLD!" he bellowed, tail furiously whipping with excitement. 

he leaned into the wind, let it rip against his mane and nip his eyes. "brother." he bade @Ingram, who was predictably lost to present view. "i don't think she's here." he paused--who had he been referring to? his eyes fell upon the grotto. he knew its sad mouth with eyes of uncertainty. he knew the anguish. "Wylla--i don't think she's returned to this place."

as sunlight palely waned overhead the dark-furred wolf made for the open part of the sandy swath, turning inland as he identified his brother's lone figure silhouetted against the tide. even from this distance he could see the melancholy that clung to lycaon's bones - he knew, just as his brother knew, that wylla had not been here.

at least not in recent memory -- not that the raw rinds and the whipping tide did anything to preserve evidence of any wolf's passing.

a grim expression coalesced ingram's features. "no," he agreed, his gaze trailing towards the sequoia ridden treeline. perhaps they would have better luck in the copse, where the elements were not so cruel and life was perhaps less dreary. ingram couldn't imagine any place as dreary and foreboding as the sound -- he imagined lycaon felt worse about revisiting this place.

"we could try there." he motioned to the tall giants, whose trunks shook like stilled leviathans and boughs uncurled like iron-wrought hands. he thought the forest strangely inviting, in a mystic and somewhat eerie way.

at his brother's suggestion to canvass the coastal forest, Lycaon balked and retreated a step. "Ingram this isn't...our home anymore... we can't just go in there." he hesitated worryingly, ears switching nervously as a clockface's hand would strike each second lapsing by an uneasy hour. "we don't know who's home this is now. what if we're disoriented, and can't smell them? all i smell is salt. i think we should look somewhere else. north west, maybe, south north," he shook his head, beginning to work himself into a fluster.

lycaon may have brought up a valid point (re: salt and its pungency) but what kind of brother would ingram be if he just acquiesced immediately without some hint of bullheadedness? he did not immediately share lycaon's fears, though as he trailed his gaze along the dimly lit entrance of the giant forest, he started to feel a little small. those trees were taller than the cliffs - some so wide he may well have walked half a mile around their circumference (ok, small exaggeration). if they were big, did that mean other things in the forest shared their massiveness?

"but what if wylla is there?" he pressed stubbornly, though by now he had lost his impulsion to venture into the canopy. "where would we go instead?"

his own reservations scotched Ingram's initial gung-ho approach to barging into an--at this point--unfamiliar forest. Lycaon hadn't tracked the spoor of deer through that eldritch forest in what felt like centuries. he didn't know those moss-covered stones, or the name of the wolverines in their hoults, or the ideal place to watch the ashes of the night transform into burning embers of daylight.

he remembered, mostly, places where he cried--and he didn't very much care to revisit such wretched crooks. 

Lycaon paused to muse on his brother's reply, brow furrowing as he tried with all his might to think of something that would be a better exploratory investment, you know, for their mortal souls... "to catch a Wylla, you have to think like a Wylla." he said with a sage nod, taking his gaze from the uninviting maw of the forest and leveling it concernedly with Ingram's. "do you.. think she's looking for us too?"

with his temerity in investigating the spore-ridden forest halved, ingram turned his deflated gaze to the arguably smarter of the two, deferring to his words with a moment of disputed silence. on the one hand lycaon's strategy was ironbound; wylla was a tempest, a white-hot and rash cloud -- ingram could not imagine any storm could subdue her. she could be anywhere.

and at the same time, to try to think like wylla was extraordinarily challenging for the dark adolescent. for one, wylla probably had more cunning in one cranial hemisphere than ingram had combined; and for two, ingram was a special brand of selfish - the kind that might not pick up on habits or desires of others unless they directly (negatively) impacted them.

he would have liked to believe wylla was looking for them, but who would want to reunite with two snotty, semi-neurotic siblings? who wished to withstand familial beatings by tongue or barb? surely wylla was smarter than that. "i think so.. i mean she probably really misses us." riiiight. "so, uh. which way, d'you think?" he asked, unwilling to

"i think uh...so i think she probably went through the forest..." Lycaon winced, ears rowing backwards with dismay and the woe-iest of woes. he reckoned, anyone brave enough to go somewhere scary like into the clutch of the great sequoias oughta figure themselves to be the meanest thing on this side of town, and Wylla was definitely the type to kick in the snoot of a bear if it looked at her funny. 

this bade poorly for the brothers, who were stanced awkwardly on the beach--contemptibly timid and looking like a bunch of cowards. "what if she comes back here, while we're in.." hehhhhhhnnnngggg "there? should we leave something so she knows we were already here?"

ingram's gaze ran up the long side of a sequoia -- a tree which whose width and height seemed to breach even the heavens. his gaze slowly ran earthbound, and he looked at his unsure brother with equal lack of temerity. ever the pragmatist (and arguably smarter of the duo) lycaon suggested some sort of sign to mark their passing.

"you're right," ingram affirmed with a nod of his slender muzzle. he picked up a trot and swung to the grotto, a scant few feet away. without ceremony he hiked his hip upwards and began to urinate a weak yellow stream of liquid outpouring from under his hood. this is what lycaon meant, right?

i mean, it's not as if ingram could spell -- and even if wolves could spell well enough to shape a rudimentary spelling of 'w-y-l-l-a' on the strand, it was arguable whether or not ingram would have ever mastered spelling anyway. he was probably the kid that was held back in third grade a few times, or four -- and destined to be a deadbeat.

lmfao

Ingram was swift to action, immediately coming up with his own interpretation of Lycaon's proposal that they denote their arrival here. i mean, he couldn't criticize him for his iniatitive--and he certainly couldn't critize the guy's penmanship. the golden striations rivuleting down the rockface almost resembled what Wylla's name would look like if it was in comic sans typeface.

Ly posed a look of humored disgust, recoiling when he noticed the outflow from his brother's pennywhistle steaming from the drop in temperature upon emission. "i think you have an infection, dude." he snickered.

ingram lowered his raised hip slowly, staring lycaon dead in the eye as he had the audacity to question his little peter. he stamped his foot on the ground abruptly, and turned to face him. "do not." he hissed, though as steam riffled from the wet surface he leapt back and squinted.

"what are you, an expert on chodes or something?" came the woefully inadequate, somwhat barbed riposte. "gay." with a grumble he staked his claim on another boulder a few feet away, rolling on ground in front of it with great flings of sand aimed in lycaon's direction.

WHY DIDNT YOU SMACK ME i didn't see you respond! one more from you to wrap it up and archive?

he twitched a gooey smirk at his brother's denial of his urinary afflictions. "don't hafa'be an expert to know goo the color of a crows foot isn't the sign of a healthy manhood." he cackled, flinching away from dervish of the sand lobbed his way as his brother huffily distributed more of himself -- probably ruining the day of some poor crab buried in the sand.

strutting to the inkclad boy, Lycaon leapt over his head onto the boulder and cocked a leg, letting his own perfectly healthy stream trickle the way gravity willed it... approximately atop Ingram's head. feigning surprise, Lyc lurched into a defensively playful pose, slapping his paws against the stromatolite -- his tail swishing tauntingly slow. he made a tsking noise. "well how are ya gonna attract the ladies now? talk about a catfish. smell me, get you. woof."

"wa--- HEY!" he yelped loudly, retracting from the ground abruptly as lycaon's intentions (and excrement) became evident. "nahhhsty." ingram growled in a pout, slouching off towards the water with deep indignity writ across his black muzzle. lycaon was lobbed one last rueful glare before he slipped under the tow, small bubbles rising to the surface to mark his underwater passing.

he could not hold a grudge long -- no sooner had the water swept clean his pelt, he was in good spirits again. with limbs wobbling as he shook he stalked towards the shore and spun hard, lunging towards lycaon in sweeping strides with water still streaming from him. he issued several nips to worry lycaon's flank, and with a playful growl loped carefree down the swash-line.