Wheeling Gull Isle a place called kokomo

Coelacanth felt the thrum of Komodo’s chuckle before she heard it; it traversed with a ripple of his cavernous flanks into the great barrel of his chest, then bubbled up through the strong column of his throat like dragonsfire. When it emerged from him in a series of low, sonorous huffs, Seelie thought of her draconic twin and her heart clenched painfully. Neither she nor Amoxtli had been expected to survive — Corten’s bloodline had produced two pairs of twins thus far, but only in the colloquial sense of the word. Crosscurrent and Selkie’s children were true twins, born from one sac and possessed of identical DNA despite their vividly different appearances, and they had been so small and frail at birth that their sire had quietly given up on them. It was Selkie’s obsessive maternal instinct that had ultimately saved them.

Komodo drew back slightly then, and although it may not have been his intention to produce such a response, Coelacanth withdrew from him fully. She settled her weight on her haunches, inky plume pooling in a feather-edged crescent around her, and watched him with a curious tilt of her delicate head. “Y’can’t just go ‘round callin’ people ‘sleepyhead’,” Komodo told her, his gravelly baritone rollicking unhurriedly from his smiling mouth.

The sheepdog tossed her head, a Coelacanthism that loosely translated to, “Pff!”

“Sleepyhead,” she insisted in a halting, breathlike whisper. Pronouncing “Komodo” was more difficult, as the first consonant was utterly unfathomable to her — a disadvantage, given her closest companions were currently Komodo, King, and Cascada — so she whispered shyly an abbreviation of his moniker: “Modo.” She wrinkled a nose at his quip in mute skepticism — she was almost always polite! — and then she remembered with a start that the creature wasn’t. She stopped just short of falling into a quagmire of self-consciousness, though, and changed the subject accordingly by nudging the bridge of her nose against one heavy paw.

Coelacanth backed away from her protector with a meaningful quirk of her muzzle. “Come on!” was her meaning, and she made a dancing sidestep to urge him on.