Dragoncrest Cliffs let me tell you that I saw your boyfriend walking down the street

sobeille settled back into the groove of sapphique. she’d missed the rhythm of the ocean, the well worn paths — the sting of salt on the air.

some things were different than before she left. tante chacal had her children. but there were new faces, too.

sobeille sought out @Saint, rounding upon their dark form one sunny afternoon. who be you?

this got ramble. no need to match the length! <3

'who be you?'

a young woman about saint's own age rounds upon her. gaze sweeps over her, though only the golden eye truly sees in definition and detail while the other shows saint the horrid sights of the world unseen: thick fog and writhing shapes that were unidentified masses.

the other woman is the color of ruddy cinnamon and framed with black on her face.

what a loaded question!

she has been so many things and yet somehow nothing at all. a patchwork wolf. every facet of her is stolen from someone else: the listener, her older siblings, but mostly kremlin whom had been her guardian of sorts, filled with some noble duty to protect her from the world ( if he only knew! ) until she'd abandoned him following the call back to the wilds.

saint. offered simply; like it was less of a name and more of a word sewn to her breast in an attempt to identify her. vaermina. bearclaw. melonii. those names hold more weight to her, cloying upon her tongue ; honeythick. but she does not offer them. they are the names she associates with her older siblings: fanatic and obsessive and unhinged.

though, those traits could be claimed about her too, in all fairness.

who you? she asks in return, feeling the tug of societal pressure to learn about her pack mates. she had a life debt to pay to these women who had welcomed their home to her without question and it was a heavy one; weighing upon her shoulders as if she were atlas in wolven flesh.

another appraising sweep of her gaze is given.

now that the girls faced one another, sobeille had an opportunity to fully appraise her. she was built not so different than those of sapphique, suggesting a seafaring lineage — but she was, in sobeille’s opinion, entirely the wrong color. the wolves of sapphique were red and blacks the the manner of the stark granitestones that made their home; this one was a dark stormcloud as it loomed over the cliffs.

her eye was missing. or, not missing — clouded. it peered back at sobeille like the eye of another world. 

sobeille rivani dahomey. the pride in her identity showed in her voice. she pointed her muzzle at saint, expression fixed. where you from?

sobeille is proud of her name, of her heritage in a way that the saint is not sure that she is. that she even understands. but sobeille's full name fills her mind with visions of the sea, of a warm beach, of pretty seaglass and colorful tropical fish. it does not bear the tar thick shadows and rotting carrion that tangle 'round saint's own.

she's almost jealous.

but, it was hard for saint to know who she truly was when she was just a patchwork of the bits she liked from others she'd once known.

i not from anyvhere. saint says simply; her truth. she could name at least three different packs she'd briefly been apart of at one point in her short life but not a single one of them had been home and thus not worth mentioning, in her mind.

at times, sobeille wished she could crack open skulls and examine their contents -- the way a child might do to an overturned rock and the civilization of lesser creatures underneath it.

she would have found saint's conflicted views of who she was very intriguing.

saint sported an accent. sobeille was used to the rest of the world not sounding the way those of sapphique did, but she didn't understand not being from anywhere. everyone came from something. it was impossible to not exist without a vast network of prior connections.

'ow is dat possible? you must 'ave 'ad a maman. sobeille missed the cues that this was something saint would likely prefer not to speak of.

sobielle, naturally, questions saint's vague response.

she doesn't really know ... beyond what her older siblings had shared with her but she questions whether she can believe their words which had once settled into her chest like home but she now wonders if that was just something sinister taking up space in the illusion of home.

of truth.

a soft sigh. no place vas home. saint chooses more specific words this time but remains vague. there is no point in rehashing her failures, nor the past. nyet, the word is harsh though she does not mean it to be so.

had listener, the title she'd been groomed to inherit. but the mantle settles over her shoulders all wrong; like rot creeping into her. vas not good mother.

one of the many things that fascinated sobeille was learning of other cultures. saint was vague — but sobeille was an excellent inquisitor.

listener? she repeated, marveling at the weight that had been in saint’s words. what dat be - is dat what mother is?

as for the rest — sobeille’s identity was firmly tied to her home. she wondered what it was like to be like saint then; an untethered itinerant who only home was their own heart.

in a way, it sounded freeing.

in truth, saint is not sure how to describe the listener to sobeille. her actual memories of her mother were implanted memories given to her by her older siblings. maybe saint remembered a flash here or there, but her and her littermates had been so small when she'd given them away.

saint's ear twitches over her blind eye and she draws in a breath, the salty sea brine tangy as it lingers like a film over her tongue. listener birthed me, she says; struggling to find the words to explain. it was a very unfamily dynamic. older siblings raised me.

listener more like title. but she knew her birth mother by no other name.

birthed by a creature called the listener, raised by older siblings. this was not so different a dynamic from sapphique, but something told sobeille saint's upbringing had been very different.

she decided to change the topic. there were hundreds of questions brimming in her mind, waiting for their chance to be sprung. but first: what happened to your eye?

it isn't the first time she's been asked about her eye: kremlin had inquired about it during their first few days traveling together, though he had guessed some sort of womb injury and saint had been inclined to let him believe it. it didn't really matter to her: perhaps he'd been right but either way, her sight had always been cloudy and hazy in it. blind but not in the sense of total darkness: just monochrome and undefined. blurry.

the unworld.

the world that lay festering beneath.

do not know. vas born vith eet. an injury would've been so much cooler, but without any scars that might lend aid to such a tall tale, saint is forced to rely on the truth.

sobeille found strange kinship in saint’s disfigurement. saint’s came in the external form; a ruined eye that peered into the un-world. sobeille’s blemish was internal, but no less disfiguring.

she wondered what else might be wrong with saint; did viscera anchor to a wrong place, was an organ out of order?

she sighed and looked down the beach. sunlight rippled off the waves. the water was still cold from winter’s hold. an’ what happened to your older siblings?

sobielle asks a lot of questions, and though the shadow stained part of saint wants to recoil from them — to hoarde any truth about who she was in that deep, dark corner that it resided in — she finds that, mostly, she does not mind answering them.

she could tell any sort of fable she wished to, and yet she found the truth spilling from her lips as if she were spellbound.

vho knows? she shrugs her shoulders, hoping to communicate that there was no love lost there. they vanted me to be listener. eet almost vorked. likely, they find someone else to be listener. the curse of the dark cult that ran rampant thru her bloodline.

sobeille was intrigued. this family dynamic sounded so different than what she was used to.

they’d tried to pin saint into an unsaint-sized hole.

she leaned in, eyes measuring the murkwater depths of saint’s singular bad eye.

what does being listener entail?

the questions about the listener dredge up with it dark things that saint had been trying to run from: a plague in her blood that she cannot purge, no matter how she pretends to be someone else. anyone else. yet still, she uses the name she was cursed with at birth: saint.

she shifts her weight, a soft sigh pushing past her lips.

speaking to gods, dark magics — terrible things. a very vague and summarized version but it is the one saint chooses to remember and thus it is the one she offers her companion; secretly hoping that sobeille would not ask anymore.

gods, dark magic, terrible things.

sobeille leaned forward, golden eyes glinting with magpie interest.

an’ you did not like dese things? she breathed, scarcely disguising the incredulity in her voice.

sobielle was asking questions that saint doesn't want to look too closely at the answer of.

net, she spits the word in kremlin's native tongue, having picked up some of it; but mostly because 'no'd' been his favorite word to tell her.

meny sacrifices. sacrifices i vas not villing make.

sacrifices! sobeille’s eyes grew wide, ignoring the very blatant cues that saint was not enjoying the probing as intensely as she.

what kind of sacrifices? she breathed in, her imagination galloping off with all sorts of scenarios. maybe saint’s siblings were all sacrificed! were dere blood sacrifices?

saint's companion peppers her with questions; needling against her hesitancy. she does not wish to speak of it but in stead of telling sobeille as such, saint just keeps talking. as if possessed by an eagerness to people please, as if her mouth and words are not her own.

perhaps they are not.

nothing is her's; and if there remains anything of the true saint within it is a tiny, smoldering pile of ash.

blood. body. soul. she cannot articulate what the dark gods of the listener had asked her for, what she had already given before her great escape.

anyone else might have measured the hesitancy in saint’s words and lessened their intensity. not sobeille. in the snarled knots of sobeille’s anterior insular cortex, where a species of empathy might originate, sat a darkening shadow in the manner of a black cat.

we should do our own sacrifices. sobeille reflected suddenly. it was disappointing that sapphique offered no formal procedure for procuring blood. ’ow does one sacrifice a soul?

sobeille asked many more questions - but eventually, mireille called her to bluepeace and saint was given some much needed peace.