Hushed Willows Sim Sala Bim on Your Tongue

A high, breathy giggle escaped Dante's maw at the girl's awful joke (his favorite kind), intensely contrasting his usual honeyed baritone. It was so, so fucking nice to hear a joke, he hadn't realized how much he needed it. The thought made him smile a bit with perhaps a bit too much endearment, and he quickly attempted to hide it by dipping his head with his snout pointed downwards, eyes fixed on the ground pointedly as the corners of his mouth curled upward. 

Dante was ridiculously pleased with himself when a sweet laugh slipped past the girls lips, his ears perking up to catch the sound as best as he could. Her voice. He was even more pleased when he saw the look on her face, as though she was genuinely enjoying their conversation. Gods he missed this. He bit down on his tongue to keep himself from grinning too wide at her bashful words, his nose crinkling to try to disguise some of his merriment as he watched her head wag softly side to side. His left paw shuffled just slightly, a new energy envigorating him simply from a pleasant conversation with an unfamilar girl.  

The young wolf's smug joy was quickly washed away as she stated her name, dulcet voice cascading over him for the briefest of moments as he took it all in. Lumiya. He'd never heard the name before, but it was suddenly his very favorite word, unusual and light, unlike anything anyone had been named back home. He blinked at her owlishly, trying to brush off his shock and hoping he wouldn't seem rude -truly, he was just charmed- and trying to slip back into his cool, friendly mannerisms. "Lumiya, huh? S'quite a name you've got there. Definitely the name of an iconic leader." Dante found himself with his eyes locked on the intricately-marked stranger- Lumiya - for a few quiet moments before he realized that in his fascinated stupor he hadn't even thought to offer his own name.

 "I'm...uh, Dante." He offered a delicate smile before his eyes glanced fleetingly at the ground, feeling a bit out of his depth. The boy generally did quite well at keeping collected, even around lovely strangers. He decided to blame it simply on the fact that he hadn't spoken to someone in quite some time. Dante took a deep breath in as subtly as he could to catch his new acquaintance's scent, trying to play it off with a shift in his movement; if Lumiya was really doing the big things she had spoken of, then it was likely she didn't have much time for scraggly strangers she met encroaching on her territory, and he wanted to be certain that he would remember every atmospheric bit of these moments when he looked back on them. "S'a pleasure to meet you. So you're really forming a- a court here, then?" His head tilted inquisitively. "If I'm being honest, I'm not exactly sure where here," he pulled his eyes from Lumiya for a second to take another glance at the terrain around them "is."