allegro

For @Ephraim; this takes place in Monolith Forest.

For my own reference, five month old Koi’s build, head shape, and size: i · ii. Coat length is slightly shorter; ears are a titch taller, and tellingly tufted.

There was no sign of @Thresher here amongst the ancient sequoias, so despite @Sixgill and Koi’s ardent pleas, the sheepdog forbade them from trying to find a way into the heart of the Sound. Genially unperturbed, the third- and lastborn Volkodav-Cortens gamboled gaily through the frosty forest, winding around the thinner tree trunks like oversized weave poles and counting how many koilengths — a measurement just shy of a sixlength — it took to circle the oldest denizens. The gold cloud child and his black pearl tagalong wrestled merrily on the mossy forest floor in the shadow of the Appa Tree — the largest tree in the world, according to their inexpert and incomplete census — but when Koi broke free and sprang away, she was quickly distracted by a pale flash in the trees.

“Treasure!” she thought, but kept quiet. She and Six had been wrong a lot — and Coelacanth had reacted each time with the ingenuously wounded expression of a dog on the receiving end of a broken promise. (What? You mean, you don’t have a treat in your hand? You mean, you pretended to throw the ball? You mean, we’re going to the veterinarian instead of the park?!) It turned out everything kind of looked like Thresher when you really wanted to find her. Sand, shadows, rocks, foliage, other animals…

…so, yeah. Koi didn’t say anything this time around. She “alerted” sharply, ears perking so vivaciously their tufted tips tangled together, and chased down what she thought was her favorite sister. She was just about to make the kill — i.e. pounce on her wayfaring littermate and keep her from getting disappeared again — but when she rounded the bend and leapt, her quarry turned out to be a creamy pale length of…bone?

Maybe?

Whatever it was branched outward like coral, with rounded prongs and fanlike fronds, but it wasn’t coral. The few experimental licks and nibbles she dared were more reminiscent of antler than bone, but this was bigger than any antler she’d ever seen, so she convinced herself that it was whalebone. Perhaps she could be forgiven her mistake; caribou didn’t visit Wheeling Gull Isle. She worked her teeth delicately around the midsection and began to drag it back toward her mother and brother, but trying to maneuver it through the trees was a difficult task for the finespun puppy. Somehow, she managed to get it stuck between a particularly dense section of groundcover and exposed root — and the harder she tried to free it, the stuck-er it seemed to become.