Emberwood please be quiet

Set 07 July, after this. All welcome. <3

Ico could scarcely believe what had happened. His limbs were buzzing with adrenaline, his heart thumping a wild cadence against his meager chest. He had run non-stop for the remainder of that stormy night — a night he'd never forget — and well into the morning. Now the sun was high and white, drying his sodden white fur into a crispen mess. When he finally slowed, albeit with great hesitance and many glances back over his shoulder, Ico realised he was aching to the bone.

And completely lost.

The young runaway blinked his brown eyes, and looked around. He'd found himself in a handsome aspen grove where the afternoon sun shone golden through the canopy. He picked a sunbeam, and sat himself in it. To his surprise, Ico was not trembling... he felt very, very still. But there was still something profoundly wrong; a great echoing in his skull. That bloodthirsty howl. It wouldn't cease.

Please stop... he muttered desperately. Please be quiet.

If the heat didn't kill him then the other Saints would. He was tired of sitting at their interrogation tables. He was tired of sitting under the incadescent lamp and sweating. From far away, from the top corner of the room, Donovan watches. Had he washed all the blood off yet? Had Nemesis been fed to the birds? The world was losing its edges. Look up and it seems that there's nothing really separating you from the great vaccuum.

The sight of so much green brings Colin to tears, again. Recently, he had started to cry for no reason at all. He closes his eyes. he sees Ruth, he opens them. He hasn't seen the backs of his eyelids for a long time; there is always someone there.

He looks up to find a boy who is curled in on himself, captured like a dust mote in a ray of light.

He turns once to compose himself and turns again to ask, Are you alright? Empathy has never felt more like cement shoes.

Although he'd been internally begging for the howl to finally fade from his mind, Ico was alarmed to hear some other sound that reduced that background cry to a whisper. His body went stiff, and he looked up to see an unknown wraith whose blades of black fur reminded him instantly of Merrick. But everything reminded him of Merrick right now.

Ico shook his head, meaning to toss the shadow from his mind, but it looked like he was shaking his head "no". Thank you, I'm just — oh gosh, however to explain it? It felt impossible. Unless... I'm just lost. True in all ways.

The pale boy speaks and trips over his own words. He feels the sweat rolling in slow, winding trails down the back of his neck. The cicadas scream.

I'm sorry, he says, uncertain. It's impossible to know what the boy means. He's just lost. He smells like a pack, and vaguely of bears, though Colin is sure that he is somehow imagining that. There are harder things to conjure up inside your head. Is there any way I can help?

Truth is, he is no more secure in his world than the boy is. Unmoored, swept out to sea, at the whim of God... he knows that he must have faith. He clutches at it, close to his chest, as if it were something alive.

Even after his experiences with Ursus, Ico had not yet grown beyond his naiveté; at least not entirely. So when a rugged stranger appeared out of nowhere and offered to help, Ico was perhaps not as suspicious as he should've been. He'd left the only pack to ever accept him, he'd left everyone he knew (and suddenly a name dropped in his head with a thud: Germanicus. But now was not the time to ponder on this). He had nothing left to lose; so why not trust in a stranger, and grant him the benefit of the doubt?

I'd... very much appreciate knowing where I am. Truth be told, I don't even know in which direction I've been travelling. Ico had escaped Bearclaw Valley in some random direction, too swift and stricken to notice any landmarks on the way. What he absolutely wanted to avoid was starting up again and ending right back in the belly of the beast

Well, he murmurs. You were going towards where I came from. He points at the Sunspires which sit far away like spectators crouched at the top of a stadium, tinged with blue. Away from your pack? It's half a question and half a statement. Colin liked to exist within these in-betweens. What were you running from? is the implication here. Colin liked to create implications. It wasn't so different from creating negative space on a painting.

He smiles gently, apologetically. I'm afraid I might know less about here than you do. 

It was no surprise that he was a stranger here. He feels how unfamiliar the ground is beneath his feet, the horizon he has never seen before, the leaves on the trees which flap in the wind in a way he had never quite observed, and will never observe the same way again. 

Ico wished he could return the smile, if only to reassure the kind stranger that he did not begrudge him his lack of local knowledge. But Ico couldn't smile. He was still too shaken by the night's events; and his eyes remained wide, because he was concerned about what he'd see if he closed them for any length of time...

"Away from your pack?" — Ico nodded at the question. His affirmative answer wasn't even the half of it. Away, away, away was a goal more intense than any he'd ever had before.

Ico glanced briefly in the direction in which he'd inadvertently been running. Apparently towards where this fellow came from. May I ask where you came from? Is it... is it Whitebark Stream? This was not an educated guess; it was barely a guess at all. It was simply hope, and perhaps the stranger would hear that in his voice. For now that the concept of Germanicus had landed heavily in his mind, Ico realised that there could be true purpose to his unexpected sojourn.

When he responds to his question, it is with more tension in his voice— No, I'm from Redsand Canyon. He doesn't know it but Ico's fear is bleeding into him. It was an inescapable evolutionary trait. Surely if one man was scared to death, then the other had good reason to be. The skin on the back of his neck prickles with the heat of a gaze that isn't there.

Reasonably, this invisible enemy had nowhere to hide. It was hard to imagine that any kind of malevolence could exist in these woods, choked by sunbeams and dust like seeing an attic in your summertime house through rose-colored glasses. But Colin is shaken by the white-haired boy's anxiety all the same.

What happened, if I may ask? The inevitable question, the pinpoint on the horizon they were hurtling towards, it is said in a near-whisper.

Ico's heart, still thrumming from his run, sank a little at the dark stranger's response. Not because Ico did not recognise Redsand Canyon, but because the other evidently did not recognise Whitebark Stream. As spontaneous as the idea to find Germanicus at Whitebark had been, it was still a plan. Now Ico would have to devise a new one.

But in the meantime, he felt he owed this wolf honesty. Not only that, but Ico had absolutely nothing to lose... he had no reason to keep the bloody truth of Ursus from anyone.

There's a pack called Ursus, at Bearclaw Valley. It's led by... The one man who'd accepted him despite his flaws, the one leader who'd taken him in after so many had refused... Ico swallowed. A murderer. One who revels in bloodshed, and spreads it among the innocent. I couldn't call the place home any longer, I just couldn't. He looked at the gaunt male steadily. Please stay away from the Valley. It's more dangerous than anyone could imagine. Especially now that Merrick, it would seem, was raising a brood of killer children.