Rattleskin Redoubt april is the cruellest month

Long Rain glanced towards the shadow again, wondering what he had been about to say. Though uneducated, she was far from unintelligent, and it was her innate sensitivities that had kept her alive… so far. She wasn’t aware that this sort of emotional attentiveness came from having a birth mother who did not speak to her in words, nor could she know that her own upbringing of few words could possibly mirror this boy’s.

For a moment her breath stilled as she regarded Caligula over her shoulder. His name invoked something ancient and powerful in the mind’s eye; a cavernous, toothed maw looming ominously beneath the placid surface of a black lake, or some fathomlessly dark creature who summoned the very shadows to the mountain forests. A shadecaller.

He wore it like a child wearing a too-big suit to their first middle school dance.

But he could grow into it. And if she were older, she may have thought about how nice it would be to see that happen.

Verdigris and azure glinted at him, then she resumed her panting. Father says so, she answered him with a shrug. Big lake, past mountains? Long Rain gestured west of the Sunspire. I not remember it. Licking her chops, she shifted on her elbows and flipped her hind legs so that her body curved towards him now. She jerked her muzzle upwards in a prompting motion. You?