Hideaway Strath the one minute, the soldier's minute

the closer he draws to the strath the more his head buzzes like an angry swarm, like the pounding of a beast cracking at the fissured cage of his skull trying to escape. there is something here. something he knows. in the moments when he blinks, eyes closing for a few seconds longer than necessary he feels like he's falling. like the solid ground has given way beneath his paws, a tremor rocks his spine and he feels the marred flesh of his throat and face acutely. phantom teeth and claws splice flesh and he opens his eyes with a shallow gasp of air and a roll of his stomach.

muista minut.

muista kuk olet, tienraivaaja.

pathfinder.

what good is a pathfinder that is lost to the labyrinth of his own mind?

the buzzing reaches a crescendo as he draws to a stop at the clearly marked borders. borders that hadn't been there before. borders that shouldn't be there. teaghlaigh? no. no. none of them smelled familiar to him. this is wrong.

wintersbane tilts his head back, ignoring the dizzying feel of the cloud-strewn sky above that reminds him too much not of flying but of falling and calls for the pack's leaders.

The hawk seated on her shoulder directed Towhee's attention to the nearby pass as soon as the stranger appeared in their midst. The Kilonova raised her head, squinting at the dark, imposing figure with his muzzle pointed toward the sky. She couldn't hear the howl issuing from his muzzle, yet she stood and walked, stiff-legged, toward him, X still clutching her shoulder blade.

-"State your name and business,"- Towhee demanded, more tonelessly than ever. Her orange eyes were simultaneously sharp on his face and somehow distant as she addressed him, her entire demeanor entirely mechanical. Her expression was mostly blank, though something flickered across it as an errant thought crossed her mind: Blackfeather?

though his head felt stuffed of cotton and a beehive, as the woman approaches him, wintersbane is able to dull the worst of it as he focuses upon her, the way she speaks accented by the weird gesturing she does. he doesn't try to understand what the gesturing means — at least not yet. to try to figure it out, to try to even put some of his brainpower towards it causes a dull ache to throb in the back of his skull.

wintersbane or panther? his memory was fuzzy at the very best, painful too and there was no guarantee how long it would last before it exhausted him. wintersbane, he gives his name. a home. he rasps and then wonders how truthful he should be with his limited memory. i used to live here once. in the strath, i mean. when it was teaghlaigh. perhaps it is a homesickness that draws him here now, or perhaps it is the hopes that lotte's grave might drive the nail home and restore what he feels like is trying to grasp smoke betwixt his teeth.

but there is a real chance she will send him packing and wintersbane does not rule that out as a possibility.

If the hawk perched on her shoulder or her gesticulations seemed strange to him, he made no indication. It was almost as if he didn't notice either one particularly. Towhee vaguely sensed something amiss, though there was no physical evidence of such. He looked hale and there were no strange scents clinging to him. Notably, he didn't smell like any Blackfeathers she knew and the Kilonova had to remind herself to chill, dammit.

He spoke succinctly, which Towhee appreciated, especially right now. She was about to respond to his simple opening when he added something that made her clap her mouth shut in mild surprise. She hadn't known another pack had lived here, especially in the recent past, though Towhee immediately thought of those odd strangers they'd had to roust in the beginning. She made a thoughtful noise low in her throat, though she quickly filed this away as an interesting but not particularly important bit of information.

-"It belongs to Asterism Grove now,"- she answered, still entirely devoid of tone. -"I'm one of the leaders here. What are your skills, Winterbane?"- Only after she said his name did she realize she hadn't gotten it quite right, it was plural winters. Oh well.

in the overload of memories straining against the labyrinth walls of wintersbane's mind and what felt like a internal war not to lose what shreds of sanity he felt he was clinging to and the enormous effort to focus on their conversation in lieu of the throbbing in his head ( and possibly not throwing up on towhee or in her vicinity ) he does not immediately notice the hawk perched on her shoulder ...and when he does he pays it little mind. it's not the strangest thing he's encountered in his life, after all.

asterism grove. wintersbane naturally assumes this is the name of her pack. nothing like the gaelic his father spoke, nor the lilting words of the north of the nightingale queen. i'm a warrior and bef—, he pauses and takes an uneasy breath because speaking for long periods of time is still hard despite that the flesh wounds have healed to scars. before well this i was aiming for ambassador. he gestures with a paw to the scars on his neck, throat and face. it's hard for me to speak for long periods of time. he would not be reciting Shakespearean sonnets anytime soon ( thankfully ).

and then he asks, purely to sate his own curiosity in case he'd be turned away: there's a grave in the heart of the territory, marked by the hemlocks that grow and guard it. has anyone found it? has anyone disturbed it? if nothing else, that lotte's corpse continued to rest in everlasting peace was all he could muster to care about at the moment, his own welfare be damned.

I sent you a PM but wanted to note for anyone else reading this thread (hiya! *waves*): Towhee's aforementioned suspicions about his being a Blackfeather are 100% paranoia with no canon basis whatsoever. She currently suspects everyone she meets is possibly a Blackfeather because of her history and recent events. I didn't actually realize (or at least forgot) he was actually associated with them at one point!... lol, oops. Anyway, I just wanted to make that clear. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk! :D

He didn't seem any more bothered by her mispronunciation than by her hawk or signing. In all likelihood, he probably thought it was just part of her odd manner of speaking, so Towhee didn't dwell on it. She focused shrewdly on his lips, her orange eyes squinting when he broke off to take a breath. He went on to explain that he found it difficult to speak at length. The Kilonova met this information, and the rest of it, with an impassive blink.

Her head raised a little, ears tilting ever so slightly forward, when he asked an unexpected question. -"No, not as far as I know,"- Towhee answered after a beat of silence. -"Although I think I know the place you're talking about. I had no idea there was a grave there. Whose is it?"-

the relief that he feels as towhee tells him that, as far as she know the hemlock guarded grave has been untouched, is palpable and he trusts her at her word. it manifests itself in a soft sigh and a slight fall of his shoulders, as a great weight has been lifted. he supposes, in the end that was the whole purpose of the hemlocks — poisonous as they were. to ensure her grave went undisturbed even when arturo and hemlock were no longer in this territory to guard it. the earth has probably settled, he concludes more to himself than anything else. it's been...a long time. years.

my mother. wintersbane admits, throat growing tight with an unexpected rise of emotion that leaves his head pounding more insistently then before.

She could see what this information meant to him and marveled again at the fact that someone else (several of them) had lived here not so long ago. She swallowed and drew in a breath when he told her it was his mother's grave. Towhee nodded a solemn acknowledgement but didn't say anything in response. It had been a long time ago, according to him, and she barely knew him, so condolences felt out of place.

-"You mentioned you're a warrior,"- Towhee said after a beat. He certainly looked the part. He was powerfully built, plus there were the blatant scars marring his features. She supposed some might think them ugly, though the Kilonova didn't see them that way. They made his blue eyes shine even more fiercely.

As she gazed openly into his face, something still niggled at her. She sensed something off, though she could hardly put a finger on it. Towhee didn't try too hard. She still didn't know the first thing about him, really, aside from the fact that he'd lost his mother and won some fights in his time.

Picking up on her earlier thread, she said, -"Tell me about your experiences in battle. Tell me the stories behind each,"- Towhee continued, pointing her snout at his cicatrices in turn, -"of these."-

she capitalizes on that he'd said he was a warrior and then gestures to his scars asking for the stories behind each one. there was another dull throb in the back of his head as wintersbane shifts around for the information. falling. the splice of teeth upon flesh. silent begging the reaper to come and end his misery, end his suffering. he hadn't and the specifics still continue to elude wintersbane like a sly will-o-wisp taunting him but dancing just out of his reach every time he goes to grasp it.

he's almost disappointed that he didn't have a collection of epic tales to each scar.

they all came from the same fight. he rumbles, sure of this much at least. vanity had been his god, once upon a time and though he'd boasted of his prowess in battle he'd remained blessed to not bear physical reminders. those days were long behind him. i don't remember much about it. i remember we fought and he nearly killed me. we lost our footing and tumbled over the edge of an outcropping. i'm not sure whether i dealt the death blow or the earth. i lost my memory. it didn't matter, really. point was: that ex-companion was dead.

most of my memory is still missing. wintersbane feels like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle — with the same frustration at knowing that it's a winter cottage but missing enough pieces that all you're left with is the very edges of the building, part of the roof, part of a window filled with warm candleglow and a lump of snow that was the beginning of a tree while everything else remained missing. it occurs to him only after he finishes speaking that being truthful might be a risk but the last thing he wishes to do is lie; and thus he gambled deciding that the risk was greater than trying to conceal his hand.

The news that he'd gotten all his scars from a single fight was somehow disappointing; it did not speak much to his skills as a fighter. The story that unraveled had her lips twisting into a slight frown. It reminded her of her fight with Screech, which made her mouth taste suddenly sour. And the news about his amnesia did not bode well either.

-"But you remember living here? And your mother's grave?"- She probably sounded skeptical but Towhee needed to understand the depth and breadth of this condition. -"You mentioned that you were going to be an ambassador before you got these injuries, that you're a warrior too. But how can you know, if you don't remember?"- she pressed with genuine intrigue.

wintersbane watches as his gamble starts to show a losing hand and suddenly he is second guessing his own decision; but he decided to be truthful and he must see this to the end regardless of how it goes. yes. i was born here. my mother, lotte ansbjørn-fearghal lies in a grave guarded with hemlocks within this strath. he repeats, because there was no doubt to be found in that. i've been a warrior and scout for a long time. older memories are clearer. and i didn't say i couldn't remember anything just that there are still things missing. he clarifies. his head is throbbing in earnest now and his stomach roils again. i'm still remembering. or trying to.

i have no interest in lying to you, wintersbane tells her point-blank. believe me or don't. but decide whether to accept me or send me away ...because his head was pounding and he just wanted to lay down and try to sleep it off whether that be in the strath or some neutral territory.

She met his defensiveness with a blink, then grimaced when an obtrusive thought presented itself: I could've sent him to Raven to get his head checked. Towhee took a breath and shook her head, as much to shake off that thought as in reaction to his remark.

-"It's not that I don't believe you, I'm trying to understand how badly brain damaged you might be,"- she replied, probably a little crassly. -"I do believe you,"- she clarified, a thoughtful look on her face as she thought about the hemlocks apparently guarding a secret grave.

-"I'll accept you with the same conditions as anybody else: prove yourself or you'll be asked to leave,"- the Kilonova decided after a brief deliberation. -"And I have an assignment for you, to get you started. Go check in with a wolf by the name of @Ruenna. Explain your condition to her, ask her if she knows any way to help."-

brain damaged. the word bounces around inside his mind like a haunting and instigating echo. brain damaged. his first reaction was 'no' because he couldn't have brain damage ...could he? the loss of his memory was just a set back. a set back that appears to be trying to right itself. he remembers who he is, what he is, where he came from. he remembers his parents, his siblings, his mother's grave. important things ...and yet there are still gaps. gaping holes that leave much to be desired and pursued.

sounds fair, wintersbane rasps in agreement to the terms. thank you. an assignment is given to him: to seek a wolf named ruenna, to see if she had anything that might be of some help to him and his 'condition' as towhee had put it. i will. he assures her, wondering if there was anything medicinal that might actually be of help.

If he took offense to her frankness, Wintersbane didn't show it. He agreed to find Ruenna, a task which he could take up immediately if he so desired. If not, he could simply tour the grounds and get settled in. She figured he'd probably want to go visit his mother's grave in the near future too.

-"Welcome to Asterism Grove then,"- Towhee said. -"I'll leave you to it."- With X still sitting silently on her shoulder, the Kilonova turned and resumed her usual post.