Ravensblood Forest the one minute. the soldier's minute

“Nearer,” the kuningas korpit uttered succinctly, encapsulating a litany of suggestive encouragement in only two syllables. They rolled from his tongue like a curl of cigarette smoke, clouding Lotte’s vision and filling her lungs with a dizzying heat. She threaded her way down the slope without another word, large paws spread wide to accommodate the shift of stone and rubble until she could no longer hold her leisurely, deliberately comely pace and was forced to bounce the rest of the way down in a series of graceless, stuttered leaps. She came to a bumbling halt in a tangle of limbs, right-side up but decidedly disheveled, and the breath whooshed from her lungs in an exhilarating burst of low, husky laughter as she shook the debris from her fur with a saucy flick of her coal-plumed tail. Unperturbed despite this show of clumsiness before a wolf she admired, “Near enough?” questioned the soot-stockinged rogue when she was a few feet away from Arturo, vaguely teasing.

Breathing deeply of his scent and the sap-spiced woods that lay beyond, Lotte tipped her broad muzzle toward him with a coquettish smile. He was a fine specimen of a male, for all that his trim, svelte framework fixed Lotte with an indelible illusion of chubbiness by comparison. Her thick northerner’s undercoat and curvaceous musculature did not show to advantage beside him, but he did not seem to mind — and neither did she. She was accustomed to being perceived as a zaftig matron rather than the trimly-muscled maiden she truly was. “Ai,” she sighed, a note of wistfulness creeping unbidden into her smoky alto timbre. She longed to give him the truth of her identity, but it was too early on in their acquaintanceship to trust him so. “I wonder what manner of lord you will be, kuningas korpit,” she mused, “and what manner of followers you will lead.” She was curious about his pack and his intentions, wondering how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.