burn through me like a fire

I could always adjust Kerberos' age by a year if that's easier. Also, we're glad to be here. :-)

It didn't matter to Kerberos that it was colder than Dante's hell outside. It did not matter that the water was just chilling as ice as it collided with his hocks, licking at the cream fur of his underside as it rose and fell to meet him. It did not matter that anything creature would be questioning Kerberos' sanity – he didn't care. He was a far cry from the melancholy child he had been, and even then he was different from the hermit teenager he had become after. Though Kerberos himself could not see the astronomical changes he had made, instead seeing only the vagueness; he had changed nevertheless. A greeting caressed sand colored ears, foreign and yet familiar at the same time, surprising Kerberos. The Aok peered over sea green eyes taking in Akhlut's relatively familiar form, gaze inquiring even though Kerberos lowered himself into submission his stomach touching the wet sand, squinting temporarily against the saltwater that splashes upon his muzzle as it crashed over him before he rose to a more neutral stance. He shuttered once with a shiver though he uttered no complaint of the chill that had crept over him in that moment. "How do you know?" Kerberos asked quietly, muted, almost certain that he'd introduce himself simply as 'Kerberos'. For a lack of not being sure which name to consider himself, or if he held any rights to either of the names regardless, he always shied back to using 'Aok'. The son of no one.

The perplexed expression dancing across Kerberos' face vanished to one of diluted shock when Akhkut explained how it was that he knew who and what Kerberos was. It came to be known in a matter of seconds that Akhlut was the son of Aktaie -- Kerberos' own blood mother -- and Nanuq, Kerberos' adoptive of sorts, mother. At hearing their names (though he had not known Aktaie very well) his heartbeat raced a little inside his chest as he stared at Akhlut with blatant wonder. "N-no," Kerberos stuttered, picking up the habit of his childhood and cursing himself to the pits of the Sea for it. It was beyond embarrassing. "I...It's ok. I uh," Akhlut had dropped the nuclear bomb of surprises upon Kerberos and the Aok was struggling to understand what, exactly, he felt about it.

So it was not just the Sea that Atka had guided Kerberos too, but also, his half (adoptive) brother as well? Kerberos did not know much of his own litter, knowing only that he was the son of Aktaie and Lecter. That have been all that Nutaaq had been able to tell him, that and that he had been a tool of both of them -- at assurance of the Nereides and Shearwater Bay's alliance. "How is Nanuq? A-and Aktaie what is she like?" He couldn't seem to contain his curiosity about his birth mother having never truly gotten to know her in the same way he had known Nanuq. "I don't think either of those names are available for me to call my own. I have always been an Aok." Kerberos corrected Akhlut's previous greeting of him softly, almost sheepishly.