Whitefish River some sad singers, they just play tragic

Let’s get drunk and eat things. Massive powerplay of @Stockholm.

Between her tightly clenched teeth, the tiny Groenendael gripped the wiry husk of a coconut, holding it up and away from her body as much as possible. Now and again, it thumped painfully against the frail swell of her breast, but she stubbornly endured the pain lest Stockholm attempt to relieve her of her prize. Bright cerulean eyes eagerly sought her towering companion, widening briefly and then crinkling at the corners in a happy dog smile as her eyes roved with feline possessiveness over his heavily-muscled frame. Since she’d found him that day on the Southern Strand, the pair had become virtually inseparable — and even when her natural capriciousness drove her to venture out on her own, she never went out of earshot. Though they were already close enough for his fur to tangle pleasurably with hers as they walked, she pressed closer still, nearly dropping the coconut in her excitement to rub her cheek against the moving target of his elbow.

The Gampr had a hefty burden of his own: a pumpkin that Seelie had slow-cooked by wedging it between a crevasse in the nearby hot springs for a day and a half. It was too soft now for the pale-furred wolfdog to hold the charred flesh of the fruit between his teeth, so he was forced to carry the unwieldy thing by its stem. The plan, conveyed in her odd amalgamation of whispers, whines, and body language that Stockholm now understood with perfect fluency, was to fish from the river she’d spotted on her way to freedom from her imprisonment in the “bad forest” — and, if they were so inclined, to explore the glittering cavern she had spotted during her brief stay.

As the sound of singing water reached her ears, Seelie bounced excitedly — and in doing so, lost her grip on the coconut with a soft, jarring click of her incisors. It rolled down a nearby incline and through a warm hollow that smelled tantalizingly of field mice; but the sheepdog was too focused on catching up with her prize to be tempted, let alone to realize that there was another smell there as well — one that ought to be intimately familiar, despite being blurred over with time and loss. She followed the roughhewn sphere until at last it slowed to a stop, and when at last she realized that a very familiar, very wolf-shaped silhouette stood before her, she too slammed on the brakes. The sound she made, not quite a growl but more guttural than a whine, was low and uncertain; she huffed out her breath on a soft boof! and allowed her hackles to prickle like inky quills as she made herself small and skittered backwards, keeping distance between herself and the unknown as she tried to remember who Olive was and whether she was a threat.