Leaving Red Rock behind was the easiest hardest thing that Viatrix had ever done. By all accounts, it should have been difficult and heart-wrenching to leave behind the pack mates she had known all her life, but separation anxiety was the furthest thing from the DeMonte gene pool besides unattractiveness. Instead, the svelte bitch had felt nothing but free since departing, not even the faintest hint of homesickness.
Any potential that she might regret her decision was erased when she finally found terrain that wasn't mountains and valleys. Although Teekon Wilds reminded her of home in its interior regions, when she emerged on a dark strand bordering a stormy sea, she couldn't have been further removed from memories of home. Never before had the two year old seen the ocean, yet she felt no compulsion to crash into its waves and roll about like a pup. She, after all, was a well-educated and logical adult who knew that foreign things were best left alone.
Instead, she wandered until she came upon a thin river, and at its bank she stopped to drink deeply, aware by the scent on the wind that there were wolves living in this area, but oblivious to the exact number or just how dangerous they could be.
The sea was calming to Sköll, whom had grown up on it’s precipice where Odinn’s Cove ended to a tumulus cropping of jagged and craggy earth on the drop to the murky depth of the sea that was sometimes calm and sometimes slammed against the earth with it’s fury. It was a treacherous drop — if the rocks didn’t crush the bones in a body on the way down the sea smash it against the rocks and rip it apart well enough, or simply they would drown. As a child that precipice had been the edge of the world for Helga would never allow him to go near enough to see the vast stretch of sea that had, later, became the edge of the world to Sköll. Almost to his second year birthday and he still didn’t know if the sea truly was the end of the world and for the most part he was accepting of the fact that it was for the Gods to know only. He had chosen to linger for a while on the Sea Lion Shore given that it…in some ways reminded him of home and while he had his eye on the Isle pack that he knew lingered on the small island out to the sea he did not approach them yet simply because he had sacrificed and prayed that Hati and Fenrir would show up and they would decide on a pack to go to together.
So far Sköll had yet to see hide nor hair of either of them.
Some gallant, brave guardian he was, the Tiny Viking thought with a chiding scoff at himself as he moved through the unfamiliar forest in the hopes of catching a familiar glimpse of white and the childish giggles and tittering of the twins. Just as calling Sköll ‘tiny’ was not an exact appropriation — he not tiny in the sense of height but in the fact that he lacked the brawn most other Vikings exhibited, instead favoring his father’s gangly and willowy build, built for speed and stamina rather than the endurance of brute force — neither was considering him cowardly an appropriation. It wasn’t as if the twins had been attacked by a bear and he had fled. They had snuck off in the middle of the night when Sköll had been asleep during Fenrir’s assigned watch. Many scenarios flashed through his mind, each of them growing worse and visually more gruesome and morbid the more he let them go before he gave his head an abrupt shake to dispel the next thought: death.
They were both trained in battle, they were young but Sköll did not think either of Kenna’s youngest to be incapable. Even he, for all his un-Vikingness, was a capable fighter …even though he did not enjoy fighting as most of his ilk did. He had been born to heal, not kill; even though his father swore that both went hand in hand that his knowledge of healing could easily be turned into a discreet art of killing. The line, Sköll understood, was an extremely fine one.
It was as he was walking, following a snaking, thin river that his black, leathery nostrils flared to inhale the scent of another loner. Female, and a quick glimpse up told him he was approaching at a quick pace. The Tiny Viking careened suddenly, surprised that he had been so caught up in his thoughts that he hadn’t realized that he was closing the distance on another. One look at her told her, with a blatant obviousness that was like a crude slap to the face, that it was not Hati — the fur was all wrong and the woman before him was about his own age, maybe older; it was probably too much to ask that she could speak his native tongue which was, horrendously, the only language he could speak and so he decided to avoid it before it bit him in the rear, by hoping to turn away and lope away before he was noticed …if it wasn’t already too late to avoid her detection.
The approaching animal was slight enough that she immediately identified him as a yearling, but filled out just enough to tell her he was a male. His form was willowy, not unlike many of her own family members, and something about the way he was skirting her suggested he was skittish. She watched him for a moment before loping after him, water still dripping from her muzzle and eyes fixed on his retreating form.
Viatrix was happy to let others be, but she required answers, and there was no telling where this male had come from. She assumed that he knew something about the region. Certain that he could provide her with the information she hoped for, the DeMonte picked up her pace and called out, “wait! I need your help!”
Whatever slim hope that Sköll had possessed that she hadn’t noticed him at been abruptly crushed when she called out to him. Of course her words were entirely foreign to him, sounding like nothing more than a bunch of prattling gibberish, indefinable and nonsense to the Northman. All except for one that was. Help. Hjálpa. On that word, the consideration that she might be in distress though she had not looked like she was a maiden in distress, the Tiny Viking visibly hesitated in his steps, body lurching as he was physically torn between the urge to keep going out of the simple desire to avoid what was likely going to be an awkward social interaction and the complicated desire to want to help her. While other of his ilk wouldn’t have stopped, or in a rather crude turn of events would have tried to help her into their beds (so to speak) Sköll was in the business of helping distressed wolves. Mostly this did not have a reason to extend pass injuries but he knew, even as he deliberated, that he could not abandon her as long as she was in the need of his help.
That wasn’t the kind of man that he was.
Where that particular value came from he couldn’t really say but it was there, nevertheless. Sköll turned to face her, abandoning his obviously futile attempt at sneaking away, as she approached and he let his eyes move over her again. Silently, he assessed her coming to the conclusion that, once more, she did not appear to be in any sort of distress. Even as he thought that he glimpsed around them though his flared nostrils told him that it was just the two of them here. “Help?” Sköll attempted to make the word a question, trying to ask her ‘with what’ without using the words, assuming that she could not speak his native tongue; voice heavy with his accent. It was with the consideration that he probably sounded extremely childish that he offered her something of a sheepish expression.
For the DeMonte woman could tell immediately that he wasn't schooled in the common language, if not by his accent than by the heavy way he pronounced the English word. She paused in her advance to leave ample space between them and lowered her head, twisting her ears forward but maintaining an expression of neutrality.
“Are you from here?” she asked, wisely choosing to stick with simpler words that the accented yearling might understand. Her intent was not to frighten him further, and though the logician required knowledge of her surroundings, she knew it could wait until she established some sort of understanding with the youth.
Sköll watched as she physically attempted to soothe him by the polite in way her ears had laid back upon her skull, reading what he thought to be confusion on her face glad that at least as far as physical gestures were concerned there was no language barrier. Of course, realizing that he had confused her only made Sköll feel culpable for more or less trying to sneak away. It hadn’t been a very chivalrous thing to do and left him feeling rather like some kind of fiend; beyond that it made him feel cowardly for letting his inability to speak their common tongue debilitate him. As if it were some kind of living beast that had jumped to reality from his nightmares. He was a Viking and if he did not even fear death why did he let his inability to effectively communicate verbally freeze him in terror. It was pathetic to the Tiny Viking.
The woman spoke to him again, voicing a question known only by Sköll because of the inquisitive tone she spoke in. Though his assumed distressed companion had intentionally used smaller words in the hopes he might understand them he picked out two words ‘you’ to mean him and ‘from’ to mean as Ragnar had explained it used his origins, wondering why the common tongue used so many words to say what they wanted. “From,” Sköll repeated the word, mouthing it to himself once, twice, and a third time as he shifted his weight awkwardly trying to shift through the very small and pitiful hand full of words in the common tongue he had been able to learn from Ragnar. “I am from —” His words were spoken slowly, communicating that he wasn’t sure that they were correct. “— norður …” Frustration created the lines of his face as he tried to recall the common tongue word for it knowing that it was in a small way, similar. “nor…noorrdd…nor-tur…north,” He paused then, brow furrowed from his painful attempts to remember the exact word. “From north?” He asked, meekly hoping that he had gotten it right.
“Is there a pack here?” she wondered next, gesturing widely with her snout to their surroundings. She certainly hadn't meant to ask about Skoll's origins. She had meant where he came from recently, but of course, their language barrier was much to large for her to have expected his understanding. “Family?” she tried again, in case the name of pack was unfamiliar to his tongue.
Viatrix repeated ‘North’ after he had tried to stumble out the common tongue version of the word, cringing with each attempt to sound it out he had made, and Sköll nodded eagerly, shoving his nose in the direction he had came from, the direction that Odinn’s Cove lay in very, very far North — “North.” — he repeated firmly. It would seem, though, by her less than enthusiastic response that he had not, accurately responded to her question. Or maybe it wasn’t what he had wanted to hear. The eagerness that had presented itself briefly left Sköll and his ears slicked back to lay against his skull at half mast as he tried to go over what he was pretty sure was the right word for North, not realizing that when she asked where he was from she hadn’t meant literally where he’d been born.
He picked out the word ‘pack’ and took it, despite that the meaning of the other words were totally lost upon him (someone should have taught him the word ‘here’ it would have helped tremendously), to mean her asking if he was in a pack around this …Elsewhere. Solemnly, Sköll shook his head ‘no’. “Pack?” He gestured to the Isle with his muzzle, “Pack,” and then gestured to the East with his muzzle. “Pack.” He was attempting to tell her that there were two packs within their immediate reach that he had scented out. She inquired as to his family. It was a weird inquiry to him. It was a simple word, one that Ragnar had deigned to teach him even though it took a while. Of course he had family! He did have a …something of a family member here in the second pack he had gestured too but he was hesitant to tell her, afraid that she would seek Ragnar out and let the once Jarl know of Sköll’s presence here so he shook his head ‘no’ because he thought it was the best course of action to take.