Gyda protested when Ragnar had taken a pause in his story to groom her, pushing the mussed downy soft, dark silver fur back in the direction it was meant to go, ruffled from when he had skimmed his nose through it previously. Her paw pad meant with the Jarl’s Viking’s tongue in a quiet way that told him clearly to stop. He pulled a face getting a tongue full of dirt from her paw pad and recoiled his tongue, scraping it against his teeth. Dirt was not one of Ragnar’s favorite things as far as taste went and accordingly he surrendered to his daughter’s physical command.
The steel colored child cooed her pleasure when he had begun to tell her the rest of the story, fairly simple in it’s design and how Ragnar chose to make sense of the world around him. How his culture chose to make sense of it. Someday, her and her brothers would come to realize that. In a way, it wasn’t entirely fair that while Ragnar did not expect the religion aspect of his culture to be followed or accepted by his followers, he expected both from his children. He would raise them how his parents had raised him and his brothers, and their parents before that …what they chose to do as adults was up to them because then he would have no say over them. As he finished his story he glimpsed down at his daughter where she was nestled against his chest, tucked securely into the crook of the junction between his shoulder and leg where if her silver did not clash with his, darker as it was, she might have went hidden.