Horizon Ridge you are free from the bonds that bound you

There was a familiar smell to the air here—brine and sea grass—and the taste of winter’s chill on the air. He was familiar with coastal environments though he had not been raised there. Solpallur was a wolf from the mountains and deep valleys, where wilderness spread much further and was much wilder than these climes. Where wolves did not pack themselves into tight corners and their territories wavered, waxing and waning with the seasons.

At least from what he had scented as he and @Stjornuati made their way across this domain, that was his best assessment of the packs they had avoided thus far. Strong borders were a deterrent as they should have been, but he could not ascertain much from them other than they were healthy and wary. Little wavering, little breakage—they were guarded, but from what?

No matter, he had forgotten the matter as he climbed the ridge, once again separate from his bróðir. It was easier to cover ground this way for both of them, to make their discoveries and seek each other out later. They never had a predestination in mind to meet, but there was an uncanny, innate way they found one another. Whether following the same trail eventually or simply happening upon each other, it was a safe bet that they were perhaps never truly separated by more than a short distance.

Had there been more of them, they would have spread like a fan across the ridge.

A gull cried and gave him pause, and his head craned skyward to watch it fly.

Bound northeast, Miranda reminisces. 

Out of a forest rises a thick slab of rock, a giant's browbone, dimpled and rugged (phrenologists would have a field day with this one) breaking apart the more or less uniform horizon. Somewhere a bird calls out into the saltwater smells. Ranks of balding trees run high up the sides of the ridge. To one side, it stinks of autumn, organic matter decaying and oozing broken-down sugars, to the other, you're hit with the surf.

A dark man is climbing the ridge, and he doesn't smell of a pack ... Miranda's curiosity takes over again as he follows in the stranger's steps up the rough stone surface, a safe distance away -- he lets out a low chuff in lieu of a hello.

A voice calls out to him and his head turns—at first he mistakes the distant figure to be Stjornuati. The coloration is almost spot on, but this one lacks the livery of his pallid brother, and the adumbral hairs along his spine and shoulders rise. He curls a lip back to flash a glimmer of teeth—a warning, do not come any closer—but Solpallur does not make any move to receive company.

His body language is enough to do the talking for him.

While he did not turn to fully face the stranger, he questioned why he was being followed with a narrow-eyed glower. Would this be like his last encounter? Or perhaps the one before it, where curiosity had drawn a skittish deer of a woman to him to entertain conversation in exchange for information. Whether it was battle or otherwise, he stood ready. Chances were, Stjornuati would be circling back around to him before too long, and his brother was truly the talker of the duo.

Nevertheless, Solpallur would always try.

Like a double-blast -- the stranger's fur stands on end then his lip curls, revealing teeth choked by last night's meal and plaque -- Miranda understands. He stops, and his ears slide back. Easy, easy.

I wish you no harm.

Is it just him, or is the air always charged with tension? It seems he can't quite escape it. He wonders if there's really someone out there that lives their days languid and mollified, just the way a dalmation is sprawled, facing a fireplace of a dictator's chamber. Hope that makes two of us. The stranger still hasn't turned around to face him, and that's what makes him the most uneasy out of everything, that insistence at anonymity. What does he have to hide? The disquiet prickles at his eyes and membranes like an allergy.

What did he have to hide? Nary a thing—it was then, knowing that the other wolf had stopped that Solpallur swung around to fully see just what, or rather who he was dealing with. Another pallid face and body, not unlike his brother, and one who still wore the signs of being a alpinist despite their relative proximity to the open waters. It made sense, not only did skyldmenni find one another, but that such a being would be able to keep up with the duo in their climb along the ridge.

“Alpínisti,” he growled, “you follow. Why?” A harsh tongue and voice, seeming ever disused and commanding. He did not know a gentler tone, let alone an easier way to present himself. His was a life of seclusion, of survival, and of bared teeth to take and defend. Yet here where they had been guided by stars and dreams and desire alike, he had a thirst for knowledge that burned at him.

“Do you seek the mountain?” It rose behind him now, unforgiving as his tongue was grappling with the common language spoken so freely here. Not the first nor the last of the mountains he had seen, but perhaps the most interesting of them all. The weeping forest had spat them out to here, and regardless of how things went, Solpallur had every intent of scaling its reaches in due time.

In the face of his breath -- rank, feral, base -- he finds himself fascinated, not morbid but self-destructive, what Freud would've called the death drive or the Todestrieb. 

A bristly chin. This is someone that has lived on the edge of society for so long it's warped his brain chemistry, or maybe that was the way they were all meant to live. The neurons for civil elevator talk die out and are replaced by one objective that burns a white-hot hole through grey matter: to survive.

Miranda always imagined himself and the people around him living on a spacetime manifold. There, mental kinematics -- accelerations, momentum, torque, all worked on their minds in brilliantly terrible ways. Curiosity, he says, offhand. He notes the foreign accent, which might've come from a different solar system to Erzulie's. I come from it. I owe myself to the sea, now.

But the way he stands on the rock face, how his toes grip the surface, is pure gut feeling.

His thoughts are right, and this wolf is one of the mountains too. His face twitches, almost threatening to smile but he thought better of it. His sort of smiles are the kind that were drawn up from nightmares, making him seem more hellhound than barbaric soothsayer, and it is well known to him that he has done more harm than good for merely trying to smile. But the smugness wears onto him for the briefest of moments, stolen away by commentary of the sea.

Owed to sea, was it—what a strange concept. Entirely foreign but the sort that has a particular allure to it like a lovely storefront window to draw one in and to be gazed into. From which Solpallur’s gaze does not waver to try and pinpoint where the haze hides the sea and the bottomless quantities of salt and other brackish bearers. He sees into and yet through, yet not at all.

He wanted to know more. Needed to know more. His head tilted.

“How?”

One word, still rough off his lips with intrigue beneath the gloom of his foreign tongue.

A muscle on the dark man's face jumps. Miranda tenses, if only out of habit. This stranger did not blink.

I'm in a pack that lives by the sea. Rusalka. He leans forward, supporting his elbows on the rock slope, his features shrewd and clandestine, as if precluding with this is between you and me. Hardy bunch. Warriors. Survivors.

Come by Rusalka's wrought-iron mailbox sometime. They've gone through so much shit, there's no klaxon siren loud enough in the world that will make any of them give up. Day by day, he finds himself caught up in their white knuckled devotions. 

You wouldn't look so much out of place, yourself. Windbitten, fleabitten, worldbitten. Just like him, just like the rest of them. The world, after all, was their whetstone.

Oh, that’s what this was. Recruitment. It wasn’t the first time someone had hung an offer out to him—it certainly wouldn’t be the last time either. Winter was coming and it was a swift, deadly season to those who were not prepared. There are words in there that he is well acquainted with too, survivors and warriors. Keywords plucked from a job description for a resume and here was Solpallur being rightly cast.

To say he wasn’t tempted for the briefest of moments to learn more would have been a lie. The wolf’s suggestive offer was a very good ad in the storefront window of the world; it may as well have been a great big neon sign flashing DETAILS INSIDE. He rolled his shoulders in a way that was not quite a shrug, but close enough; he shrugged off some of the tension that he felt.

This must have been why he was being followed. This one, this pallid little alpinist owned by the sea was curious what a swarthy, ugly minor goliath was doing roaming around outside of a proverbial Valley of Elah.

“Kannski,” he murmurs in his tongue. “I will go now, away. The mountains,” he said. He was satisfied that this wasn’t a trap, though he remained guarded. The information was pertinent to know, Rusalka easy enough to remember as a name that sounded as archaic as his own words and heritage. It was the first pack he had learned the name of, but it would not be the last of their kind he encountered.

Stjornuati would enjoy this information, too.

Truthfully, he wouldn't know how Erzulie and Rosalyn would react if he were to have brought a stranger to their borders. He was still green, greener than any kid there, and he notes how much of the Gray Brothers' brand of diplomacy has gotten to him.

Their doctrine condensed into a flowchart fit for any powerpoint was based on etiquette. Licensed and learned. That quote that went 'if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail', except it wasn't a hammer, it was a smile and a handshake, and the nails were the poor suckers trawling amid middle-class paraphernalia. 

The dark stranger bids him farewell in a plume of hot breath. His brows raise, but he quickly recovers. Goodbye.

Well, that's that then.

The stranger was willing to let him go, but Solpallur lingered a beat more, drawing in what he could of his scent to remember. Perhaps their paths would cross again, though he could not say when or where. Maybe the mountains would call to the alpinist and he would somehow free himself from the brackish bonds that held him so, and it would be there that they would meet.

But when Solpallur finally did decide to go, he turned away and departed with some haste. Finding Stjornuati was first on his list, to confer with him. Perhaps he would share such finds with the little red deer in their midst too, but she had seemed content to follow behind them loosely. Not quite with them but with them all the same, as though there were no better options to capture her in the way that they had ensnared her to come along in their venture.

His gaze settled in on the towering peaks ahead of him, and he disappeared.