Whitefish River Lost in reverie until I saw her fading silhouette.

Towhee couldn’t stay at Sweetharbor forever. She had only intended to stay one day, now it was nearer to a week. She hated to leave Caracal and his family during such a crisis, though she promised she would keep an eye out for the missing @Abel Elam in case he might have made it to the mainland. She paid one last visit to the island’s interior, mainly to check on @Anathema and say her final farewells. By the time she crossed the land bridge, it was quickly vanishing into the sea and she arrived on the mainland with wet legs.

Batman swooped out of thin air to dangle from an earlobe as she retraced her steps from days before. She followed the river inland and decided to take a break at the river bend between the hot springs to the west and the cliffs due east. The bat crept down her neck to perch on her shoulder blade as she took a long drink, then turned to peer in the general direction of the nearby vale.

Much as she wanted to visit with Jack, Towhee decided not to head that direction. In fact, she’d spent so long cycling between packs, she still hadn’t really done any traveling for the sheer pleasure of it. Slowly, her orange eyes panned to the Barriers. She hadn’t visited the hinterlands in quite some time. Towhee decided she wouldn’t mind spending a few days—hell, maybe even weeks—moseying around some old haunts.

Towhee just hoped @Phox would want to come along and keep her company.

Timestamp: September 13.

Dwin was on a solo-adventure again, after serving a dutiful week in the company of caldera kids. With the exception of Frolic. She still felt resentment towards her, even if she knew that having only one-functioning brain-cell was not exactly her younger sibling's fault. Whenever it was possible she ignored her and did not hide that she preferred the company of others. She did not care, if the kid had noticed this, it just felt good to her to have at least some control over the outcome. 

It was good to leave the ruckus behind her and immerse herself in the solitude and stillness the landscape offered. She caught up with many stolen naps, she hunted and ate without the obligation of sharing, she went, where she wanted and did, what she wanted. No annoying little voices ringing in her ears, no sharp teeth thinning her fur and sinking in her flesh. Were it not for her parents and Teya, the idea of leaving and never returning felt more appealing by the minute. 

On one of her treks from Fire Hot Springs (no sight of Val there, though she would never admit that she had been hoping to meet him there, despite being boringly grown-up and responsible) to the River she first caught a vaguely familiar scent and then saw a figure, she recalled meeting. Upon drawing closer and she recalled an incident that had involved a lot of angry talking and puking and... her not particularly liking the person. But so much had happened between that point of time and this, that she approached the lady with the same demeanour she would meet a curious stranger. 

"Good-day, fellow traveller," she greeted the elderly she-wolf, once she was within the earshot. 

She felt a guilty lurch in her gut. Was it really appropriate to take a vacation when one of her grandchildren was recently missing? There had been no sign of him along the coastline and Towhee knew well the futility of searching. She could and would keep an eye out for Abel, though she could still do some sightseeing at the same time. Right?

Batman, she said to the tiny beast attached to her, if I told you what he looked like, could you look for him?

So far, he wasn’t like X in the sense that they communicated much. He sort of just… hung around. Towhee enjoyed his company but felt a momentary frustration, wishing she could engage him the same way she’d once done with her beloved hawk companion.

Something uncanny happened then. Towhee felt Batman scramble to her other should and then bite her. The she-wolf jerked, letting out a little grunt of surprise as she arched her neck toward him. In doing so, she noticed the wolf approaching from that direction. She stared, realizing two things at once: firstly, this wasn’t exactly a stranger and, secondly, Batman had drawn her attention to her, using the same method as X.

Whoa, she muttered.

"[size=small]Honorable Lady Pukington [/size]!" Dwin exclaimed inadvertently, when she recognized the face. It was the nickname she had given to the angry, grumpy person, but never called out loud. She no longer remembered the details of the argument or, why she knew that she did not like the person too much. But - this was handy for a second chance. Maybe they could become friends?

That is, if the lady had just as bad memory about the circumstances of their meeting as Dwin did. "How are you?" she went on, as if nothing had ever happened and they were - in fact - two old acquaintances that had met each other by chance. "And who is that little critter?" she asked, spotting a mouse-like creature burried itself in the she-wolf's fur.

Although not all the words out of the yearling’s mouth were recognizable, Towhee read them well enough. Her orange eyes narrowed a little, though the corner of her mouth twitched upward despite herself. She vaguely recalled their distasteful first encounter, though they were far removed from the circumstances of that January day. It felt a couple lifetimes ago, actually, and it sort of seemed like the young Blackthorn was on the same page.

Well, I’m no longer suffering from that particular malady, Towhee replied. I feel like we went out of our way to avoid proper introductions last time, so I’m Towhee and this is Batman. And you are…?

Huh, it had never occurred to Dwin that sickness could also be related to having a nasty temper, because the more she looked at the old lady, the more she associated her with a detail-less, but unpleasant encounter. Well, if she had been ill, then why not start anew. Because - at the time she also had not been very well either. Due to hunger. And having been offered puke covered mushrooms instead of proper food. 

Though she was a bit hungry now and as she listened Towhee introduce her bat friend, a naughty thought entered her mind that she did not speak out loud. How heretic would it be to ask, if the lady offered her bat as a snack. Let's be honest - it was all fun and games with familiars in the stories, but the heroes never had to deal with hunger there. Dwin was convinced that in truly dire situation those little, furry helpers would not have a long life expectancy at all. 

"Warrior princess Dwinnderlets of the House Calderian," she introduced herself and made a bow, while the cheeky grin and sly glint in her eyes meant that she was playing a game here. "But people call me Dwin for short," she added, which was very true. "So, what are you doing here, Lady P... Tee?" she asked. "You lived in the mountains, if I am correct." 

Towhee arched an eyebrow at that grandiose introduction. She supposed it paired well with the title given to her moments prior: Honorable Lady Pukington. She might not have been in the mood for such shenanigans last time, though now she snorted in mild amusement at the yearling’s creative flair.

I lived in the mountains in a past life, Towhee replied. Now… I’m the owner of nowhere land, queen of a castle that’s made of sand. She shrugged. I have many children and grandchildren. I float between their packs. Although right now I’m feeling the solo adventure thing, at least for a little while.

Considering where they’d met the last time and the condition Dwin had been at the time, Towhee assumed she must be a loner. She looked a lot better fed now, though. There was only one way to find out.

What brings you to the riverside today, princess? Where’s this House of Calder… Only as the words joking left her lips did Towhee realize what that word resembled. Is it located at Redhawk Caldera, by any chance?

"You are like... like... that Floating Germ-wolf," Dwin exclaimed, incorrectly referring to the legend of "Flying Dutchman" or rather the wolf equivalent of it. "And you are doomed to never land and stay anywhere. Always on the move," she quoted the tale, which she did not remember fully, but which had certainly involved some curses. "Could it be that you bothered some old, evil witch and she cursed you?" she asked in a childish excitement and only later, when on her own, she would realize that this would be the first time in many months, where she had felt almost like herself again. 

"May or may not be. Depends on, who is asking," Dwin shrugged and gave Her Honorable Lady Tee a toothy grin. 

The speculation about witches and curses earned a soft snort from Towhee as she thought fondly of Fennec. She shook her head, then went still as she felt Batman now crawling toward the nape of her neck. He tucked himself in there, using the long fur as a blanket.

I think it’s just something about these wilds. If you spend your life here, it’ll be full of upheaval. Maybe it’s like that anywhere. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never left the area, ever since I was born on the caldera roughly 8,726 years ago.

She arched an eyebrow, wondering what Dwin would do, if anything, with that information.

"No one lives that long," Dwin argued playfully, feeling a sense of camaraderie with this odd, old she-wolf, because had their roles be reversed, she would definitely come up with an equally impossible story. "Even the wolf-kind is not that old. No one on this world now - is. The living thing, I think," she added.

"And I spoke with the Big Fish of Caldera myself and they are the oldest things there are," she spun the tale further. "They pass on memories of the old times, when even wolves were not around, but they did not mention you," she said. "So, how else can you prove that you are of the caldera?" she tilted her head to the side, grinning and waiting for similarly impossible story. 

Towhee didn’t feel as though she had anything to prove, though she was in a decent mood and decided to humor her. First, though, she made herself a bit more comfortable by taking a seat, then easing forward into a sphinx pose, body roughly parallel to the nearby river.

Does anybody live in the Hobbit Hole, beneath the dogwood tree? Has anyone gotten lost in the caves beneath the lake recently? Or gone dancing in The Ballroom? My parents are buried there somewhere too, though hell if I know exactly where, Towhee mused.

I plucked some details from this ancient record! :)

Lady Tee went down the memory line and named plethora of names in the caldera that Dwin had no clue about. "This must be a different caldera you are talking about it," she remarked sympathetically very much like a younger person would to an older person's tales of their youth. She was not wrong either. Caldera was a big place and there were only a handful of Brecheliant wolves to inhabit it. While the place always stayed the same - was immortal in kind of a way, then the importance given to specific places and landmarks differed for one person to the other. 

"We - me and my siblings - found a wolf skull there," she said. "In the creek," she specified, just in case the lady would decide to accuse her of desecrating graves. Though - who could blame kids for doing that anyway? If people, who knew, where the graves lied, were no longer there. And Eljay had either forgotten, where the graveplaces were, or they had simply merged with the surroundings over the years. "We called it Wilson," she went on. "Good, bony chap he was, but not very talkative. Ever tried to talk to skulls?" she asked.

Dwin insisted they must be speaking of different calderas. While Towhee doubted that, it made her think. There probably were other calderas out there in the world. She wouldn’t know, seeing as she’d lived in the Teekon Wilds since day one. And she probably wouldn’t ever know, seeing as she had no interest in ever leaving the area. Even with all the upheaval, she would only leave when she died. And maybe not even then.

Huh, was Towhee’s comment when Dwin told a macabre tale about a skull. Can’t say that I have, she answered, wondering if there was any possibility it belonged to Peregrine or Fox.

Towhee had a sudden flashback. Even after all these years, she could remember the horror she’d felt finding the remains, thinking they belonged to Alyx. Figuring out that they were her older sister’s hadn’t improved the situation by much. She would never forget reinterring what was left of Wildfire beside the other graves, which had been thankfully intact despite the deluge.

That made her wonder something which would probably hit the yearling as a non sequitur: Have you ever been to Sun Mote Copse?

"Never heard of it in my life," Dwin replied, leaving out the fact that she was not good at remembering names of landmarks she herself had not seen. Hence, how she would not have been able to find Frosthawks, even if she had followed Maia's directions in spring, and how she did not recognize any of the landmarks that Towhee had named earlier. Well, this was a bit different though - she might have known them but by different names. 

"Is it an imaginary place?" she asked innocently, because she had heard tales of old hags of the woods, who were less scary, but more crazy and could spin the most craziest yarns. Perhaps, she had run accross one such. After all she had a familiar already. And who knows, maybe in the next few posts she would start throwing curses around and do some magic tricks.

That doesn’t mean you haven’t been there, Towhee rejoined playfully, laughing dryly at the subsequent query. No, it’s very real. What made me think of it was your story about the skull. My pack lived there a while and there was a bit of a family graveyard near the river. The whole place flooded one year and… well, anyway, Elwood and Finley Blackthorn are buried there, in case you know of them and would ever like to visit them.

She thought she’d probably do that when she visited the area: pay her respect to her godparents. Towhee definitely wanted to see the place, especially after Meerkat mentioned the possibility of reclaiming it one day. She just hoped it would never flood again…

"Well, with all due respect, Lady Tee, my imaginary universe might not necessarily cross paths with yours. So - unless I found a way to climb inside your head, I don't think I will ever get to the imaginary places you have conjured," Dwin explained in a serious tone of an expert of the intricacies and physics of imagination. Then she paused and stiffened a chuckle. For, whatever reason, her mind had created an image with her foot stuck in a skull. 

"Why would I want to go see some dead bodies?" she asked curiously. "I mean, unless they are dancing and prancing around - what's the point? The souls that wore them are not there anyway," she said. "Besides no one is truly dead as long as the stories about them live on. So it is not the dead bodies you need to worship, it is the stories that you need to pass on."

Dwin entirely ignored Towhee’s insistence that it was a real place. She rolled her eyes, though there was no real irritation behind it. Likewise, she didn’t take it personally when the yearling scoffed at the idea of visiting her ancestors. Towhee was absolutely certain that she was a Blackthorn; the stripe was a dead giveaway.

Do you know any stories of them? Elwood and Finley Blackthorn? Towhee wondered, orange gaze boring into Dwin’s freckled face.

For a moment it seemed that Towhee had beaten Dwin in her own game. She blinked, mouth slightly ajar, ready to shoot back and answer and then closed it shut. Thinking hard. "Well, there was a time, when she broke her leg, when she tried to jump on a running bison from a cliff," she offered, feeling quite certain that there were grains of truth in the story and without Finley being present here and no to refute the false facts, not even Towhee could argue that this was not true. 

"She was a great adventurer - Finley that is - free and reckless like wind and grandpa Elwood was the tree that caught her," she went on with a metaphor, no longer remembering, who had framed it like this first, and there was a high likelihood that this was her invention. "You see - getting caught in branches of a tree is not a bad thing for a wind. It let's it stop and rest and look around, and appreciate a place or people for longer than it would usually do," she went on. 

"Which one are you?" she asked.

Are you sure it wasn’t a bear? Towhee interrupted, eyes glimmering fondly. She really enjoyed wrangling bears.

She did not otherwise interrupt Dwin’s musings. Of course, talking about her dead godparents made Towhee’s heart ache a little—she still missed them, even after all this time—but mostly it just felt good to reminisce about them. When was the last time she’d had an opportunity to swap stories with someone who would appreciate them quite this much? Her heart skipped a beat at the use of the term “grandpa.”

Towhee didn’t really know what to make of the question, saying, I guess a little of both. They raised me, you know. So I like to think I take after each of them in various ways. She hummed. I bet you’re like your Grandma Finley though, right? A whimsical adventurer?

"That's, what is handy with dead people - you can spin the wildest yarns about them and they are not here to argue that tales are untrue," Dwin grinned in response to Towhee's remark. Somehow she got a feeling that her paternal grandmother would not mind one bit, if her adventures got improved and made more awesome over the time. As long as she remained the good character in it. 

"No. I am grumpy, I hate my siblings, I think that my parents have no idea on, how to raise kids properly, and I am generally fed up with being stuck in one place, but I have to, because it is my duty and because there are tons of little kids to feed and look after, even if I do not like them very much," she replied very truthfully. That was the short summary of, what her life had been so far. "Do you know any of that kind of Blackthorns? Or am I the black sheep of the flock?" she asked, half-teasing, half-serious.

Sure, though maybe spin them to someone who didn’t know them very well, Towhee replied with a snort of laughter.

She fell silent when Dwin refuted the similarities between herself and the Blackthorn matriarch. Assuming her parents were Eljay and Maia, the remark on their parenting skills made Towhee’s brow arch. Oh, man, was she curious.

I mean, there were—and still are—so many Blackthorns, I’m sure they run the gamut of personalities, Towhee drawled in response. I don’t think you sound particularly out of place though. She paused. Is it just your younger siblings or are you not a fan of kids in general?

"Well, you were not there either, when it happened to Finley - who is to say that she told YOU the truth?" Dwin grinned back at Towhee. "When it comes to telling stories about themselves, people tend to tell them so that they appear in a more appealing light. An unreliable narrator," she explained her train of thought. "So - it does not necessarily mean lying, but no one ever wants to be remembered for their flaws and folly," she finished. 

"Not a fan of little kids in general. They seem to become more interesting, when they are almost grown up," she said. "While they are small, they just cause more trouble than joy. But - maybe that's just a Blackthorn kid thing. Maybe there are kids out in the world, who I could like," she mused, tempted to ask, if Towhee's kids were bearable, but then - she was a Blackthorn too. If not by blood then in spirit - which meant that she would not be able to give an objective opinion on this subject. 

You’re not wrong, Towhee thought when Dwin mentioned that young ones became more interesting once they grew up a little. Although she loved kids—particularly her own—she would be the first to say they were a humongous pain in the ass sometimes.

She opened her mouth to say something, probably something silly, when the thought of little ones made her think of Abel. She shouldn’t be sitting here, chewing the fat with someone she barely knew, when one of her grandchildren was out there missing somewhere.

Speaking of little kids causing all sorts of grief, Towhee said a little more soberly, have you seen one that’s black and white and red all over? She could’ve put more effort into his description but, If you’d seen him, you would definitely remember him. He’s very distinct. He has a little something here too, she said, touching her forehead.

Towhee set down her foot. The odds were low that Dwin would have seen Abel. But regardless of her answer, she ought to get a move on. Regardless of which direction she went, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t at least spread word in the hope that Abel would turn up somewhere and be returned safely home.

"Sorry - no - I have not seen him," Dwin shook her head, looking sympathetically at Towhee. Not because she was too worried about the lost kid, rather that this lady in her advanced age had not learned the simple fact that chasing after lost children was fruitless. Either they showed up themselves eventually or they did not. And if the latter - well, what would have been the point of searching for him or her in the first place. 

"But I will tell my pack members to keep an eye out for them," she offered, because that was the polite thing to do. Not that it would be useful in any way. 

Last one from me. You can fade out in your next post. But I would love to meet them again. Me thinks they are more similar to each other than they realize.

I didn’t think so, Towhee said truthfully, unaware that she was surfing the yearling’s brainwave as she added, I don’t actually expect to find him. I never do, when this happens. But it can’t hurt to spread the word and keep an eye out, right? Right… She sighed through her nose, then remembered to acknowledge the young woman’s offer with a, Thank you.

After telling the noble Dwinnderlets of the House Calderian to take care of herself, Towhee resumed her westward trek. Doubtless Abel wasn’t on the other side of those mountains or haunting any of the old Redhawk stomping grounds. But stranger things had happened, Towhee supposed, as she rolled her suddenly bat-clad shoulder and walked toward the setting sun.

For sure! :)