Wapun Meadow oh aberdeen, you've been calling to me

Watchful eyes—it felt once more as if Ibis watched him—haunting him. He paused, eyes tracig the setting sun and purple hues of the sky. The fur along his nape stood sharp—and calculating eyes cast toward a glimpse of silver, before the shadows enveloped them.

Silvertongue, who struck him in the desert—and walked with strangers after. He assumed her dead—and with that belief, a piece of him as well—for she had refused to come home to them all.

Wren, too, had left.

His eyes shuttered close for a moment of reprieve, swallowing the bile that rose in his throat. “Trodaiche beag,” he murmured aloud—as if the ghost of her could hear him once more.

When he opened his eyes then, it was met with the distant but fierce gaze of violet, and he arched his brows upward, lifting his muzzle up—waiting for dismissal or acknowledgement.

So the calico man was on guard.

Good.