Ravensblood Forest Happy up here

I agree, I've missed your characters! I'm trying out Jinx as a less talkative character, just to see if I can succeed without boring myself with her posts, so hopefully it doesn't awkward Pied out or anything. >_>

There was a brief pause in which Jinx's breath was held in tightening throat. Her suspense was enough to make for a decent thriller action scene, but it was short-lived, as Pied's course appeared to line up directly with her position as the female lurched into motion once more. Still Jinx remained motionless, though her ears flitted downward to the sides of her head and her lips parted into an anxious wolf-smile, the sort one would greet a potentially threatening enemy with, and not a friend.

Pied's tone when she was within earshot was calm enough, but Jinx, whose rationality and poise had been taken by the horrible thing she had seen, imagined accusation where there was none and bristled indignantly. Her glare was pointed, but it faltered at Pied's own direct stare, as though for a moment her composure had been lost. Even she could not dare to stare down her once-subordinate, not when her memory recalled with fondness Pied's seamless integration into Bon Dye. Besides, the question was simple enough: where had she gone?

The answer was not so simple. The truth of it was that Jinx had found the magical fly amanita tucked into the roots of a birch, and consumed it without thought, believing it to project her soul into the spiritual realm and taking it as an avenue to increased knowledge and wisdom. The potent hallucinogen had made her perceive a wisp on the wind, and she had followed it in the belief it was Bade, the loa she served, up to the point where she had foolishly fallen into the river. She had survived the journey downriver, inexplicably, and pulled herself to the riverbank to witness a sleepy bear's descent into its den for hibernation... But the rest of the scene, the part where it had consumed a white bear and bore the red vision of Sos, had been entirely the effect of the mushrooms.

Being so zealous in her religion, she had taken it as truth. What she had seen had been real, at least to her. But the shock of nearly drowning, coupled with the onset of starvation and the anxiety of becoming lucid in a place she didn't recognize, had effectively removed her memories of most of it. She could only remember that the loa had guided her to Sos, and Sos had proclaimed himself victor, but of what, she could not remember.

So to Pied, Jinx had almost no solid explanation. Her religion, her god, and her loa were tangible only to her, and served as shaky arguments at best to anyone else. So while her glare said, you fools left my forest, her lips parted to say aloud, the loa promised wisdom and I followed. That "wisdom" was the replacement of her intelligent (for a Kesuk) forethought and her compassion with something baser and more wild, something that had no name, but governed the innermost spirit of all wolves.