Greatwater Lake the vagrant rover life

The Coelacanth of yore might have granted King immediate amnesty, offering her best and most eloquent apologies in turn — but the cagey, feral creature she’d become reacted with blistering stoicism. The withdrawal of his threat was greedily snatched and scrutinized with a suspicious, wounded glance of lightless, swollen eyes; and then she set about ignoring him utterly. Avoidance had become the foul little stray’s best method for dealing with other wolves.

That is, until he spoke.

His boisterous, enthusiastic cry had a profound effect on his unintended audience. Tufted ears popped to attention like inverted, block letter exclamation points, and although her spine still arched like an anxious cat’s, something about her ironically seemed to settle. Her wild, cerulean eyes did not fully relinquish their grip on the paranoia and madness that had become second nature, but it was very clear that she was listening to their conversation.

When her watchful gaze fell upon the female, red is what she saw — and her kneejerk reaction was wholly unlike her initial response to King. For reasons that her reptilian brain could not comprehend, she was inescapably drawn to the russet guard hairs she espied. It was not recognition but a natural magnetism that pulled her battered framework from the mud in a surprisingly graceful sweep of spindly limbs, but as she made her first frenetic overtures toward Cascada, her eyes fixated on the two perfectly symmetrical ears.

The wrongness of those ears seemed to slam an invisible wall between Coelacanth and Cascada, and the tiny wolfdog tried to retrace her steps, walking backwards, obsessively trying to fit her paws into the prints she’d left behind. The fierce clench of her empty gut and a strange, wrenching feeling of loss cut her retreat short, however, and she huddled in on herself with an odd, toneless keening that presented itself in an erratic chorus of airy whines.