Firestone Hot Springs I got what I got all despite you

"Yes," she offered, imagining an inkling of curiousity in his tone. "It is at once tranquil and summons with gentle whispers, yet it would strangle as quick as it would soothe. It is home to beasts more powerful than you or I, but their faces are masks that seem tame and friendly." There was a lot to say, the Kesuk imagined, for a shark's kittenish grin. For a whale's dumpy body, which seemed incapable of anything more than rolling through the waves. She could not shake from her mind the image she had created of the rotund blackfish rearing up to crush Pied beneath its rolls. Jinx did not underestimate these beasts of the sea, and often warned others against doing so themselves. Though Atka and Sos had blessed the wolves of land, the wolves were neither the strongest nor the swiftest terrestrial animals. In the sea and even on the shores, they were helpless as babes.

Ariston offered a nugget of wisdom, which Jinx seized upon with an uncharacteristic fervor. Whether it was that Ariston was the first wolf in a long time who hadn't seen fit to judge her based on one incident, or whether it was his encouraging words, she couldn't say.

(It never occurred to her that Ariston knew nothing of that one incident.)

"What reminds you most of home?" she wondered, licking her lips as though to taste his coming description. "For me, it is the crash of waves against the cliffs. The breaking wake... It was my lullaby as a babe." And as an adult, as an Alpha, and the high priestess of the Gods. Never had there been a day when she hadn't closed her eyes to better focus her ears on the waves; it wasn't only in childhood she took comfort in them. Their sound awoke something in her that no turbulent lake or rushing river could rouse. If she missed anything about Horizon Ridge—nevermind the Alpha she had deemed incompetent there—it was the familiar sound of home.