Wheeling Gull Isle going in town with six rounds

He saw her approaching first at a distance and his thoughts darkened.

He wanted her to go away and turned his head as though losing her in his sight would undo how she had materialized and send her back to wherever she had come from. It was a foolish attempt but with the open span of the sandbar and the way it led, he should have known someone would eventually come to cross it.

Swallowing thickly, he continued his mindless ministrations along his parcel of the shore, even as those steps came closer, and closer. The sound of paw against the wet sand started only as a dim thing in the ambiance. He could have tuned it out. He could have fled back towards the wilderness that had embraced him so fondly. He could have lived out his days like some coywolf wraith down among the rocks and weeds.

And yet he did none of those things, even when those steps slowed near to him and his flank. Nor did he flee when her voice reached out to him. Only then did he turn to her and take in her as a whole entity than the distant, dark blot on the horizon. A horizon that now seemed endless past the isle and its glory. He saw her for what she was—a wolf, one-eyed and scarred, an air to her that suggested she was not some meek feminine creature of the night.

”Merry meet to you, sister,” he found himself saying, suddenly hung up on her words. She was cut from the same cloth as he, but the meaning was there. But he would not dare wonder aloud if she too had come from worlds like his own, however secular and secret they were. He would not out her either, nor accuse.