Raven's Watch laughed their cryings and did their dance

✹☾❂

The stretches of silence between them were long, which Eleuthera took as purposeful — these specific moments, when one stranger sought something from another (in this case, the beginning of a mutually-beneficial symbiosis) were always rife with objective evaluation and testing. Though she was not a stranger to the customs of joining a pack, as she had done this time and time again amongst her travels, Eleuthera wondered if she would ever get used to feeling so strongly under scrutiny. A specimen under his microscope. The gods were mostly kind to her, however; she almost always was able to curry favor with those she met, seemingly to blossom under the curiosity of their gaze. 

...and then there it was, the question that the man broke his silence for. Eleuthera’s ears pulled back with an air of sobriety, regarding the matters at hand. This was business, after all: the business of staying alive. The business of creating a meaningful existence out of nothing. “My mothers were master midwives,” she began after a moment, en sotto voce. “They shared with me many lessons of their craft.” Eleuthera was no expert in this by any means, but mama Olive and mama Seabreeze had always been quite taken with, and vocal about, the way a woman’s body could become a vessel for life. If Eleuthera had to become involved in this process in some way, she would know what to do — at least, in theory.

Having been lost in a reverie of times long past, but only for a brief, mere moment, the silken, lilac creature stumbled over her exhale to continue to entreat this nameless, northern brother. “I have a deep knowledge of these lands. I grew up in the willows just to the east, and I have lived in these lands for a good portion of my life.” As a vagrant and a voyager, she had always known well the goings-on in the mountains. She had seen packs come and go — she knew where the deer ran in the winter, and which territories became contested in the spring. Out of all the places she had seen in the world, it was this place that fascinated her endlessly. Her smile simpered warmly.

“I know what these mountains mean to me,” she prompted, wondering if she dare to stray into such dangerous, uncharted waters. Who was she, to ask questions of him? Yet, she asked. “What do they mean to you?”