Stavanger Bay Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy

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There was a certain energy in the air that put Szymon more on edge than usual — Doe was like quicksilver, flitting through the bay territory on hollow birdlike bones that kept her just out of his reach. He felt restless in a way he could not define and had redoubled his efforts at strengthening the borders and stocking the caches because of it. Jagoda’s return troubled him, and he’d been on his way to answer Murgash’s triumphant call when he discovered the larger Cairn male had intercepted him. At that realization Szymon had simply skulked away like a coward, unwilling to risk being thrashed to the ground where the newest Blackrock warhound could witness it. He marveled at the grotesque nature of the thickly-muscled and perhaps thickly-skulled wolf, and could not deny the new recruit’s prowess. Murgash was blessed by the Sea now, and Szymon regarded him with respect despite the prickliness of their first meeting.

On this day Szymon was swimming, testing the mettle of his muscles against the unforgiving sweep of the current. He was not so brittle and gaunt as he had been when he’d first reached these wilds, and his lean musculature was flinty and sharp; the wounds he had won fighting Mordecai were wholly healed now, and as he flexed his hindquarters, kicking strongly with the ebb and flow of the Sea, he knew his range of motion to be full and fluid.

Popping his head above water, he caught sight of a familiar shape, the salt and brine giving him little to no trouble — he swam with his eyes open, as did every Cairn, bred and raised beside the sea. The shape’s finely-drawn lines and odd ears brought an immediate quickening of his pace; he swam with brilliant swiftness, cresting the surface or dipping below to best suit the choppy waves. In the end, though, he was loathe to keep his eyes off Doe, and the last several meters had him so incensed by his longing to be near her that he swam with his forequarters nearly rearing out of the water. He howled her name — “Doooooooooooooooooooooooooe!” — a wild and raucous sound to answer her odd assortment of cries. He washed ashore, barreling toward her before he had even touched all four paws on solid ground, the pleading yap and yowling warcry causing his gut to tighten oddly. It was a sound he had never heard her make before.

The scent of her was heady and enticing, and he found himself at a momentary loss for words — Szymon was awkward and occasionally insensitive, but he was far from obtuse. Though he hadn’t experienced a female’s heat firsthand, natural instinct told him what he needed to know — Doe was fertile, and she had chosen Szymon — but he would have to fight for the glory of losing himself within her and fathering her children. His ink-lined lips curled in a threatening snarl as his hackles rose to the fore; every muscle was honed to its finest pitch as he strutted for her with a roll of his lean, angular shoulders and puffed out his chest. His golden eyes were alight with a fire that had never before sparked within his eyes, as he remembered anew her words: “I love you, Sy.”

If she loved him — if love was what she felt, the singing of the blood and the pounding of the heart that tingled into every nerve and every pore — perhaps he loved her, too. All he knew clearly now was that nothing he had ever felt before compared to his feelings — complicated and sometimes frustrating, but always alive and awake — for her. “I think,” he ventured, his bass timbre rough with desire and his tongue nervously flickering across his lips, “I think I might — I think I might love you, Doe.”