Neverwinter Forest an eidolon named night

Cypress’ hundredth post is for you! ♥

The scruffy fledgling huddled close to his father, burying his face weakly against the reassuring strength of the patriarch’s sepia-furred shoulder; in time, the tremulous stutter of his breath could be coaxed into a controlled rhythm and he grew quiet and still. “You were defeated in a spar?” he asked incredulously, his voice husky and thick in the aftermath of his tears. With the inside of his foreleg, Cypress dashed the tears from his face. He was loathe to leave the safety of his father’s embrace and rearranged his lanky limbs to tangle more comfortably with Scimitar’s, unable to stop himself from comparing himself to his brother and father even now. Rannoch looked like a grayscale version of the Neverwinter alpha — shrunken down, perhaps, but with an analogous height x breadth ratio. Cypress was skeptical that he would ever fill out quite that much, no matter how much he trained, and the doubtful glint in his lantern-light eyes betrayed his fear. Still, he trusted implicitly in Scimitar’s closing statement, underscored with a grave sort of fervency: “your mother and I have never been prouder of you both already.”

“I’m always gonna try to make you and Mama proud, Paw,” the raven prince rejoined staunchly, his youthful voice just beginning to dip into that deeper register that foretold his burgeoning adolescence. “Noch’n me are gonna be mighty protectors together and help you take care of Mama and Lucy and the forest.” Despite the envy he felt, Cypress bore no resentment toward his heavily-muscled littermate. He had inherited all of his father’s solemnity and only half of his stoicism, all of his mother’s loyalty and possibly only a quarter of her unfettered generosity. What he got from them both was a wealth of love and affection for family, and a great deal of that was lavished upon Rannoch — and now, on Lucy. Cypress found himself less inclined to wander than Rannoch and had not spent extensive time interacting with his cousins; he recalled that Rian was a ridiculously proficient hunter for his age and incredibly generous to boot, but he had only briefly met Dublin, Eimear, or Szabala.