Totoka River compose a poem, an honest verse of longing

Life without Doe, Szymon, and the brood that Coelacanth had irrevocably failed was a torturous, wearying thing. In time, the pressure built to fever pitch, all those words and all those feelings weighing heavy and immovable upon the little Groenendael’s heart, and Seelie escaped to the river that had always been her sanctuary. She tiptoed with bowed head and tucked tail across the mirror-like deltas and meandered listlessly along the familiar banks until she reached the ruin that had once been her summer home. The winter thaw had essentially washed all of her belongings away, and the den itself would require clearing out if she wanted to use it when the weather grew warmer. For some long seconds, she regarded the dilapidated state of her former den site — and then she turned away.

Wading in the shallows, mindless of the winter chill that clung grittily to its depths, Coelacanth paused and her Neptune eyes drew in the starlight as she regarded a form in the distance. Olive was always a classically pretty wolf, but gilded by moonlight with her face upturned to the heavens, she became something altogether ethereal. Seelie’s tiny body folded like a shy blossom, the graceful ridges and planes of her delicate framework painfully evident beneath the atramentous feathering of her fur as her spine curved in eloquent submission. She would leave if the pale sylph wished her to. Tilting her head back to create a streamlined, swanlike silhouette, the lonely guardian’s pelagic eyes mournfully searched the sky; her tufted ears fanned forward upon her skull with eager attentiveness as though the winking sentinels called to her, and her head tipped to one side, then the other, in doggish curiosity as an airy whine tiptoed from her lips.