Wheeling Gull Isle you've still got a little lightning in you

The waters had calmed enough to allow passage once more between the mainland and the island, and much to Coelacanth’s dismay, the freedom this engendered led to quite a few missing faces. Cascada, the girl with sad green eyes and one of the first wolves to win the sheepdog’s trust after her bleak period of madness, was one of them — and so was King, the sweet, handsome male who had called her “Pookie” and tended so fiercely to Cascada and their young wards. Seelie erroneously believed that they’d left together, and that gave her some solace. Still, more than once, she’d considered returning to the mainland to try to find them and bring them home. Cascada’s disappearance confused her especially, for hadn’t Komodo suggested she help lead them? Perhaps she was in some kind of danger — and it was this fear that had urged the skittish creature to finally turn her considering into action.

Today would mark the first time in a long time that Seelie’s feathered heels touched down upon the soft sand of the mirror-like deltas she’d once loved — but there was no fond recollection in this reunion, just a keen terror-revulsion-aversion she felt immediately upon lifting her head and looking around. It shook her to the core, and she wished at once that she’d taken @Stockholm or @Komodo with her — but she hadn’t, and so she whipped immediately around and plunged back into the water to retrace her steps. It was her intention to nestle at his side — whatever him happened to find her first — but as she dragged herself ashore and shook the water from her pelt with a last final look at the faraway mainland —

Doe?

— she caught a scent that could not be real.

Certain that she had again become the bad dog born of her nightmares, Seelie began to scuttle frenetically along the shoreline without any real direction or purpose — and by the time she came upon the dusky, coyote-lithe figure in the distance she was sure she was imagining things. Still, she crept ever closer, worming on her belly. The silhouette grew in size and sharpened in definition, until she was close enough to see that the eyes were yellow —

Coelacanth’s tongue had never tasted the Atoll’s name, but the litany of airy, appealing whines that spilled from her anxiously smiling mouth was a song in itself. Was she real? The sheepdog thought she’d pressed herself against the length of that body and nibbled at the bulb of that flopped-over ear — but you couldn’t love an illusion and expect it to love you back.