Dragoncrest Cliffs yo wè figi ou

such a rude awakening!

first the rake of claws over her head — insult enough, if coraline were asked, but it seemed her siblings were far from done with her. a rustle of movement and tiny limbs, and her own eyes cracked open in a fury, for the second or third time perhaps; the girl was not yet aware enough to truly know, but it did register, vaguely, that this sensation was not quite new. she was simply a more mellow sort than her siblings, inclined to let such milestones pass without note, without fuss. it didn't matter over much now, anyway. now there was a purpose to this ability, and so this moment mattered far more than the rest she'd allowed to pass in silence.

she turned her seldom-used, blurry gaze toward the source of the shrieking the moment it started, taken aback by her sister's cries and suddenly gripped by a fierce need to make it stop. it was hard to say in that moment whether the source was some budding protective instinct, or simply an early aversion to the din of childhood antics; only time would truly tell. for now, coraline's motives were a mystery. she was simply driven to action.

she launched herself into the writhing mass of sibling-bodies with as much force as a puppy her age could muster, and as little coordination as the rest of her siblings. her half-formed goal, barely a thought at this stage, was simply to put herself in the middle and separate the sibling pile in hopes that pulling them apart would stop the noise — a bit like taking a hammer to the dead-batteries smoke detector to make the beeping stop, but in this case, her body was the hammer.