The Sunspire The radius of your heart

When Liffey reacted with uncharacteristic attentiveness to the clear sound of a border-call, her murkwood daughter took notice. Typically when a howl rang out and it wasn't Daddy, Mommy only regarded the notes passively— unwilling for the most part to give her kids a hard lesson on independence— but this time was different. She watched with a burgeoning curiosity as the matron excused herself to personally answer the phone howl. Odd!  

But leaving Deshyr out of anything was getting next to impossible these days. Old enough now to observe hunting trips and manage her own way back to their densite, there were few physical pursuits that she wouldn't attempt to follow. (Water seemed to be the only thing she wasn't overly fond of, but only time would tell how deeply that aversion might take root.) She followed her mother using the same tactic she employed to catch bugs: creep and jump, creep and jump. It was poor strategy, but her slow progress put her far enough behind Liffey that she went unnoticed until the edge of Sunspire came up.

Peering from beneath a sway of tall fronds at the base of a tree, Deshyr blinked owlish eyes of seaglass as she observed the twilight-zone-like scene before here. There was Maia and Mommy... and two strangers who looked suspiciously familiar even though she was sure she'd never met them before. Weird! Her body began to quiver, two parts of her struggling against the other as she tried to stick to her plan and remain "hidden" while her confusion begged her to be settled.

"Mom?!" She burst from the bushes, driven clearly by the latter of her emotions. Deshyr bounded to Liffey's side, jumping up once to graze the she-wolf's chin affectionately, before turning sharp blues on the strangers before them. She clearly wasn't shy, but she was understandably reserved, unwilling to address them directly. "Who're them?" she asked, looking up again at her mother.

"and they had damn well better have black spines or Liffey was going to need to find a new boy with less dominant genes." Stevie, you are the most hilarious. That is all.