Blacktail Deer Plateau Blood still splashes

Snow! It will probably melt overnight.

For a week or longer following her talk with Osprey, Saena had tried to pinpoint the source of that weird metallic scent on the breeze. She'd developed other descriptors for it: crisp, clean, sterile. None of them seemed to adequately describe the scent by themselves, but required the backup of other adjectives. Saena's frustration only grew whenever she caught a whiff and failed to find the scent.

It was another day of searching, and Saena'd stopped for lunch not half an hour ago. She licked her lips, dipping her head to crunch up the last of the bones from a squirrel she found in a cache. She was just snaking her tongue over her nose and contemplating a grooming session when the first white flake drifted to earth.

She spotted it between the trees, falling too slowly to be rain but too quickly to be pollen. She fixed it in her sights, watched it drop onto the ground... and then she saw another, and another. Within minutes there were hundreds of fat white flakes slowly falling between the plateau's trees. They stuck to the ground where they landed and they sat on her fur like dandruff, but that wasn't the coolest thing about it to Saena.

The coolest thing about the falling flakes was that, with their arrival, the metallic scent had spiked, and it was then that Saena realized this is what she'd been smelling on the air for the past week or so.

Junior was skulking through the woods when the heavy gray sky suddenly began falling. When the first few flakes drifted in front of her face, the juvenile paused and went a little cross-eyed. Her head tipped slowly backward. It was like rain, only it fell slowly and more solidly. Even as she stood there, a fine dusting of powder began to accumulate on the leaf litter at her feet, dragging her mismatched gaze downward.

When she looked down at herself, she discovered the bits of white clinging to her, making her look even patchier than usual. Junior licked at one on her chest but it didn't taste like anything. She lapped at a few more on her forelegs even as a breeze stirred the bare treetops, shaking the naked limbs and bringing to her nose a warm, familiar scent.

"Saēna!" the juvenile shouted as she tracked down her pale sister. When she found her fellow youth standing there marveling, she noted that she could only see flakes clinging to Saēna's rusty ears and tail. "What is it?" she asked, gliding over to the other young she-wolf and nibbling at her neck. "I'm already ugly enough without looking like I have dandruff," she grumped quietly, suddenly envying her sister's pale coat.

The sound of her shouted name drew her attention away from the sky, and the familiar voice suddenly became much more important than the snow. She only needed to take a few quick strides to find Junior, who must have been searching for her as well. Saena hadn't seen her dark sister since their fight with Tytonidae. There wasn't much news but, thankfully, the sky filled in that gap.

"I'm not sure," she admitted. Surely someone had told her about snow, but Saena didn't connect the flakes that were accumulating on the ground to the cold stuff that would come in winter. "I could sort of... smell it a little while ago, but I don't know what it is. It's... pretty."

Speaking of pretty, she cast Junior a puzzled look when her sister said she was ugly. Perhaps Saena wasn't as critical of appearance, but although Junior was sort of spindly and scruffy sometimes, Saena didn't think she was ugly. "I don't think you're ugly," said Saena, still half frowning as she turned back to the sky. "You have the prettiest eyes I've ever seen, and you look strong. No one would wanna mess with you."

Although Junior appreciated Saēna's reassurance, she vehemently disagreed. "Uh, have you seen this... thing on my lip?" she asked, sitting down so she could lift a paw and prod at it. "Then there's the fact that I'm all sharp angles. I don't have curves, like you... or Ty." She sighed after saying their missing sister's name. "My fur's dry and coarse and always looks nappy. Meanwhile..." She used the same foot to gesture at Saēna, the motion speaking for her. Meanwhile, there's you, the beauty queen.

"But whatever," she sighed forcefully in the next breath. "It is what it is." Junior shrugged, then looked upward. "You don't think it's dangerous or a sign of something bad, do you? It's kind of like... the sky's falling. It reminds me of that time when the sun randomly disappeared in the middle of the day." Her two-toned gaze dropped, watching as the soft white flakes began to form tiny drifts on the ground.

Saena hadn't seen the thing on Junior's lip, in fact, having not really paid much attention, but now that it was pointed out, she could see why her sister would think poorly of herself. The skin was chapped and cracked and looked painful. Saena's first thought was whether or not her sister had sought out Blue Willow but, feeling sort of stupid, she realized it probably would have resolved itself by now if she had. She was quiet for a long while, not sure what to say if Junior was so determined to believe she was ugly.

"Watch," she said with a smile, "you'll end up being the most beautiful of all of us. I still don't think you're ugly, and... hell, I'm little and between you and me, I'm getting kinda fat." It was somewhat true: Saena had some curves that could only come from a little pudge. She wasn't willowy as she'd been as a kid, and careful inspection would reveal a slope to her belly. It wasn't unattractive nor did it hinder her in any way—in fact, it was healthy-looking—but it was definitely there.

"I don't think so," she said as she gazed up once more. A flake of snow hit her in the eye and she blinked, snorting lightly. "I asked Aunt Osprey about the smell and she said she didn't even notice it. If it was dangerous, she probably would've said something." Then again, maybe Saena was the only one who could smell it. That seemed unlikely. "It's too soft looking to hurt anyone... right?"

Junior's only response to Saēna's continued reassurance—and subsequent self-deprecation—was an affectionate roll of her eyes. Simultaneously, a snowflake drifted down to rest on the tip of her nose. Her tongue darted out to lick it, her ears quivering in response to her sister's mention of Aunt Osprey and the supposed harmlessness of the ashy white flakes drifting to earth.

"Yeah," she agreed. "I think I like it," she added as a few more settled like fine powder over her black muzzle. She went cross-eyed again, watching with interest as they disappeared into her fur. "Whatever it is. Do you think it'll pile up? It kinda looks that way," she observed, motioning toward the bits of it sticking to the forest floor.

As Junior evaluated the snow falling from the sky, Saena turned her attention to the ground. Her sister was right; the white powder was already forming into drifts on the forest floor as though some small creature had pushed it into tidy, squat mounds. A few loose flakes drifted around the base of a tree, drawing Saena's eye. She watched them blankly and shifted her attention back to Junior.

"It'd be cool if it stuck around. I hope it does," she said, not breaking eye contact with the little vortex of flakes forming in the crook of two expansive roots. Saena didn't know exactly what she was saying or that the snow was more problematic than it was beautiful. She was busy being enthralled. "What do you think it's made of? I've never seen it anywhere before."

Have post #666.

Junior pondered her sister's question a moment before replying, "Well, the trees have started losing their leaves. Maybe they shed their bark too and it comes off like this... almost like ash? Or, wait! It's falling from the sky, like rain, and it's white and fluffy... I bet it's clouds!" She glanced sideways at Saēna, feeling rather proud of her deductive skills and wondering if the aspiring Naturalist would agree.

"Their bark?" mused Saena, glancing at the trees and then at the white stuff underfoot. It was a neat theory, but not one she believed. "Wouldn't it be brown then?" she asked, but Junior already had another idea, one that was way more plausible than bark turning into white fluff. She watched a few flakes drift by her face and then nodded.

"Yeah, that makes sense," she said, grinning and staring at a flake that landed on the tip of her nose. "They do look like tiny clouds. I wonder if they rain?" The idea of rain welling up from grounded clouds was bizarre. Just imagining it made Saena giggle. "But why are they falling? They stayed up all summer. D'you think they hide-er-mate or whatever in the winter?" Bears "hide-er-mated" in the winter according to the adults, so maybe clouds fell to the ground and did just that as well.

Her sister agreed that it made sense and Junior's tail waved. Maybe she should be a Naturalist too. The idea that they might rain was both preposterous and adorable. As for why they fell... Junior gave it some thought, taking Saēna's guesses into consideration.

"So you think they're gonna fall down and hibernate... then drift back up into the sky in spring...?" she mused, making a soft hmmm noise. "Maybe. Or maybe the clouds are shedding, like we do with our fur, you know? Maybe it will even roll up into little hairballs." Junior paused when a less savory idea popped into her head. "Or—ugh—maybe this is cloud dandruff."

Junior's theories turned out to be as plausible and likely as Saena's. To any seasoned Naturalist, all of the juveniles' thoughts were ludicrous, but to two young teens with no exposure to winter, all of them seemed possible. Saena's nose wrinkled at the notion that they were hairballs, and her hair rose slightly when Junior suggested they might be, gods forbid, cloud skin.

"That's gross!" she exclaimed, pulling her paw away from a tiny drift of snow and finding she couldn't escape it. Suddenly, Saena's eyes bulged and she squealed, "Ewww! You ate some a second ago!" Just like that the snow lost all its appeal. Saena could no longer see anything when she looked at it but clouds shaking and sending a shower of their nasty cloudskin down on the wolves below. She almost retched just thinking about how Junior had lapped a flake off her nose.

lolthisthread

Saena seemed horrified by this suggestion and started to lose her shit, for lack of a better term. Junior was torn between laughing at her sister's reaction and joining in her repulsion. The dark youth gave herself a firm shake, causing flakes to drift off her pelt. She felt relieved for all of two seconds because more drifted down from the sky to stick to her black fur.

"No I didn't!" she vehemently denied Saena's claim even as she gave her body another vigorous wiggle. "Gah, let's find some cover!" she half-yelled, exchanging a glance with the other juvenile before racing off in the direction of their old whelping den.