Alpine Lake circles

It worked, surprisingly. She had been baited and he gently reeled her in bit by bit. Intrigued one way and then another; he tested the air about her as she drew nearer and found little to suggest that she ran along with others. Was she a lost little doe, loosed to the wilderness and expected to survive? He could wonder all he wanted; she may have been a little worse for wear here and there but all things suggested that she survived at the very least. Perhaps she did not thrive as well as he did, but then again Solpallur was not the sort who suggested there was much point in surviving. He looked the part of a wild man that had gone to the woods never to be heard from again, and it was that basal, feral appearance that made him seem formidable. Ferocious, if he had to be.

But she did not seem to be any of those things.

He did not know how to answer her question. Where was he from? It was a long tale that he was unwilling to share, but he gestured in the direction he had come from as though it would do the talking for him. She was gone from his gaze for only an instant, but he rounded back on her as though he anticipated trickery of the darkest sort. Wherever he had come from, it apparently gave him a beautiful tongue that was wasted in the mouth an boorish vagrant.

Solpallur opened his mouth to speak, but his tongue felt heavy. The words had too much weight to them and he struggled to grasp her language again. Always a listener, never a speaker, forever a foreigner that could not escape origin and story both.

“Why does frú walk alone? This one wants to know.”