Coconut Grove I feel it more, the further that I get

"That's good," Wraen remarked, missing the fact that she had insulted the youth without an intention to do so. There was no immediate task for Fennec in the pack she could come up with, but she decided that the best way was letting her settle in and observe her progress from aside. The right thing would come along.

"I have observed that sometimes, when tracking vision can be a distraction," large game and small game alike. "And in terms of poisonous plants - their appearances may lie, but the scent never does," she said.

Wraen didn't seem thrown by her comment, but instead answered with a reasonable and calm tone.  It was slightly irresistible.  It reminded her a lot of how dad talked to her and Fig, at least when they hadn't done anything wrong.  She felt a sudden rush of homesickness at the thought.

I can track.  I don't know plants though.  This time she decided to be honest.  She could follow a trail better than most, but she'd never had anyone to teach her which plants were what and how to find things.  Do you eat a lot of them? That was weird.

"Poisonous plants?" Wraen asked, pretending to misunderstand Fennec's question, then shook her head and realizing that this gesture meant nothing to the girl, added. "Neither those, nor other plants in general, when there is meat around. However, food is never a consistent feature in one's life and sometimes you are forced to turn to different sources of food," she explained.

"You can learn more about plants from Sugar Glider - she has taken particular interest in them - and ask Eljay as well. I believe he has some information on healing plants. And those are always valuable to learn," she told.

So she could help with plants, but that wasn't really useful then, from what Wraen just said.  Aside from healing, but Fennec had no interest in learning that as compared to the more 'exciting' skills she and her brother had been trying to pick up.  Neither Phox nor Towhee had done much to pique her interest there, and even if they had tried, doubtless it would have been ignored.

Ignored so much so, actually, that she wouldn't remember the note about her cousin even when she met her a little while later.  Maybe, she said, but her tone made it pretty clear she was only saying that.  Instead she was back and stuck on thinking about home now as she waited for Wraen to lead them off.

Wraen smiled, when Fennec showed hardly any enthusiasm for learning practical application of plants. She did not blame her - children and adolescents were just as entitled to do, what they enjoyed (within limits, of course), as everyone else. And, besides - who could better tell, what a blind wolf was good for, if not the same person, who had this first-hand experience.

"Is there something you particularly like to do?" she asked Fennec. "Perhaps, there is a trade I can assign you that fits your interests better."

Was there anything she enjoyed doing?  Playing with Fig, wrestling with Towhee or sitting up at night with dad.  But those weren't really about the things; she was bad at all of them.

I like finding new smells, and listening to the birds.  But those aren't really trades.  Her voice got a little dubious.  The first one maybe, but what good was finding a scent if following it meant she ran into something she couldn't see.  I mostly like following Fig.  That admission was one born of loneliness, because there was no way she would ever admit that were he in earshot.

"Trades come along later for all wolves," Wraen explained. She had not been sure, which path to pursue herself. Great revelations in life had come later with experience and simply dabbling here and there. "I wanted to become scout - this means a lot of travelling and meeting new people - but I always got side-tracked by scents of small game and ended up hunting and forgetting, where I wanted to go in the first place," she told. 

"And it was not until later, when I realized that my passion for story-telling is a trade of a different kind," she spoke, fondness evident in her voice. "It might not seem practical to everyone at the first glance, but I have realized that being the living memory of the pack is just as important."

She liked hunting, but she was uncomfortable with it because it seemed to be good at something, you had to be able to do it alone.  Same with scouting.  I'd probably get distracted too.  Or lost, like I did before.  The thought made the hair along her spine lift.

What kind of stories do you tell?  She asked, and for the first time, a note of genuine curiosity filled her voice.  She'd never considered storytelling to be a trade, and she wasn't sure it sounded any better than plants.  But it seemed like something she could maybe do, and it was new, so she wanted to hear a little more.

"You get good with training. Towhee is deaf and just by looking at her, you would never tell," Wraen reassured the girl, though she herself was not yet sure, which category would Fennec fit in. For a moment she closed her eyes to get the feel of, what it was like to be blind. The world was a different place - the sound, the touch, the smell, the sense of warmth. It was interesting really, but would it feel the same way, if she did not know, where she was going. If she was lost and had no way of telling, which way was safe, what enemies were lurking around?

Her contemplation was interrupted, when she nearly run into a tree and managed to avoid the collision by a mere stroke of luck. The rough bark brushed against her shoulder and it coincided with Fennec's next question. "Imagined and real ones and the mix of both," Wraen replied. "It is as in the saying - there is a grain of truth in every lie and there is a grain of lie in every truth."

While she was running, and contemplating, Fennec heard Wraen falter at the tree.  She paused a beat and adjusted automatically when the woman veered sideways to avoid the trunk, fortunately having been running on the side the tree wasn't on.

I tell stories sometimes.  It's fun to see who believes them.  She liked it better when they bought into them as truth, because usually her stories were meant to get some sort of rise out of another wolf.  If there was no reaction it tended to ruin the fun.  Are you good at making them think it's real?  If so, maybe it would be worth learning that.

"Umm..." Wraen did not have a ready answer to this, because the way Fennec had worded her question sounded a lot like "lying". She and her narrator as well had met people, who did not like fiction, stating that there was no reason, why they should take any interest in events that were not true. While she had felt offended, when younger, when she had thought more about the statement later, she had come to a conclusion that they were right in a way. A story that had a grain of truth in it, and if that grain hit a personal string in one's soul, it was more valuable than the colourful castles in the sky built by imagination. The thing was that not all dreams of people were the same, but they could come to an agreement, when the matters touched deeply moral and ethical subjects. 

"I try to find out, what my audience enjoys first," she took the diplomatic road first. "And then I find a story that would fit them best," she added. "It is not so much about making it "real" - stories rarely are - but telling in such a way that the one, who listens, find something to relate to," here she faltered, finding her grand idea about story-telling more difficult to express in simple terms than she had imagined. "Or sometimes the purpose of the story is to help people escape the reality," she added, thinking about those tales about wild-chases, life and death battles, crazy romances, anything that would keep a person so involved in the book that they would stay up all night just to read it through. "What kind of stories have you come up with?" she looked at Fennec, a hint of "try-me"-challenge in her voice.

Something they relate to, with a little truth.  Fennec guessed she bought that this would help, and she figured perhaps she'd try it out next time she went for it.  

Scary ones, she answered, and her face took on a slightly impish quality as she remembered.  Like the mud creature that lived in the lake, or the tree with claws that could grab and eat a wolf before they even saw it.  The second one she had particularly liked, though whether @Figment did as well was definitely up to Stevie.

She wasn't sure why she preferred stories of monsters, but something about the reactions she got and the feeling she got was fun.  It was hard to draw from a world of darkness, but if she took descriptions or what she knew and twisted it, she could usually make something pretty creepy.

"I knew, when I woke up this morning, that the fate was up to something good," Wraen said and chuckled to herself, when Figment spoke about her love for the monster stories. They were not particular favorites of hers, especially, if the endings were sad and the monster did not get any justice. For this reason her narrator (and Wraen too, if she knew, who Freddy Krueger was) did not like "Nightmare on Elm Street" much. There was no escape from the monster and in the end nothing that the main people had done to stop him, had had any effect. Those kind of stories just did not feel right. 

"So, what about the mud creature that lived in the lake? I suppose he had to be pretty huge one, because there is nothing but mud at the bottom of the lake," Wraen urged the girl to elaborate a little. She needed a bit of amusement. "And I am pretty sure that I have seen exactly a tree as the one you describe. It did not try to grab my ankle, but it did look positively ominous."

It isn't all of the mud, she responded, though the certainty was just because she knew the story was hers.  She'd had no idea how much mud was at the bottom of a lake; she'd only toed the edge.  That's how it hides.  Then, when you get close, it grabs you and drags you under before you even know what happened.  She pictured in her mind a weird, lumpy creature made of mud with huge, spiked teeth.  There wasn't a lot of color to it, because she didn't have much frame of reference with those things, but it was certainly a monster.

It must have been asleep when you passed it then.  She liked to imagine, when she told these stories, that she had it on good authority from other animals that she'd been told of the things she spoke of.  They'd know quick that she was lying if she ever tried to claim to have seen them herself.

"Aha, so he is a hungry mud monster," Wraen concluded and saw the vivid image of, how a huge, muddy claw grab an innocent passer-by. That was an illustration to save for later use. If Eljay had been of more creative sort, he would have used this story to keep his children away from dangerous things. She was not a fan of lying to children, but the time-frame, when you could make them believe that fairy and folk tales were real was so short. 

"Come to think of it..." she let the sentence fade and shuddered. Just think that all of the leafless trees turned into dormant monsters during the winter. Yeah, her night time walks would never be same after hearing this. That was for sure. "Okay. I will watch out then," she told Fennec. "Are there any other creatures I should be looking out for in your Bestiary?"

That mud monster reminded me of Esophagor from Neopets. Link - https://www.jellyneo.net/?go=esophagor

thats perfect!

See, there it was! That reluctant nervousness when they talked about it.  Sometimes it was fun to be scared, as long as the danger wasn't real.  

Not too many. I have to hear about more, since I can't see things myself.  But I'm sure there's some more out there.  She twisted her ears, listening for the birds above them.  I bet there's a rock one, but I didn't have time to find out because we were in a hurry.  

That was a lie, for sure.  She just needed a little time to come up with one sufficiently spooky.  Improv wasn't her strong suit.

Once upon a time a very long time ago Wraen's narrator was a small kid and an avid watcher of "X-files". Until the day, when one of her parents accidentally told that there is evidence that aliens are real and the series became too real for that kid to watch. Almost three decades later that person has never watched a single episode of Scally's and Maulder's adventures again. Though Wraen had no idea of this particular experience, she had empathy enough to understand, why horror stories fascinated children and why it was important not to scare them with reality too early. 

She did not pay much attention to the girl's lie, because her own mind was busy, going through the folder called "the book of imaginary beings" looking for a monster or a beast to impress the girl with. Bahamut, Chimaera, Catoblepas, Burak, The Eater of the Dead, Leviathan... hmmm.... Eureka! "Have you ever heard about "Squonk"?" Wraen asked the girl with a mischievous smile.

"The Book of Imaginary Beings" is an actual book by Jorge Louis Borges. A collection of mythological beasts from various folklores, literature works and other sources.

Fennec in the meantime was also thinking, wheels churning to recall the areas she and the stranger had passed through.  There's been the one place with the wind that whistled creepily.  She'd been on edge the entire time; Rosalyn hadn't seemed to notice.  Maybe some kind of shrieking or crying ghost, the way it seemed to surround you but not come from anywhere.

A squonk? No.  She had to repeat it because she almost missed it with her internal processing.  What's it like?!  She had to arm up for when... well.  If she met Fig again.

"A squonk is a pig-like four-legged creature with an ill-fitting skin. It is too big for it, therefore it is all wrinkly and folded. And it makes a flapping sound, when it moves. A kind of like you hear, when a duck rises from the surface of water," Wraen explained as best as she could, but she came to realize that she had no idea, what the scope of Fennec's tactile and limited vision experience was. Whether she knew, what a pig looked like or, what "wrinkly" and "ill-fitting" meant.

"It is very ashamed of, how it looks, and constantly weeps. There have been hunters, who have tried to catch it, but - once caught - the squonk dissolves in tears," she explained and then something funny occurred to her. "But I think that with you being blind, you have a very good chance of befriending the poor beast," she added. "I mean - everyone is always about catching it, but maybe it has been the wrong approach all along."

Squonk - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squonk

Fennec couldn't picture the creature that Wraen described but she could hear it, and it sounded unnerving.  She liked it quite a bit, actually. It sounds cool.  Being able to sound like that, at least.  Maybe for a monster it was sad to be so ugly that everyone left you alone, but she figured she wouldn't mind too much.  And besides, she liked ugly things.

Probably.  Especially if they agreed to help me scare other wolves.  Being scary looking doesn't have to be sad. She figured the squonk simply wasn't scaring the right way.  By this point, she had pretty much forgotten about her family's situation, her recent travels, and that they were going home.  She was concentrating well enough on keeping her feet under her and not running into things, but she was fully invested in this conversation with Wraen.  She'd never really met anyone interested in her more bizarre habits and thoughts.  You seem like you wouldn't catch one either.  It wasn't a question, but it was a bid for confirmation.  They were the same, yeah?

"Nope, I don't think so," Wraen shook her head. "In my experience it is very hard to convince people to change their minds about themselves," as she said this, she thought of Eljay and the luggage full of insecurities he had carried all the way into adulthood. And it sometimes felt that without that heavy load he would feel even more lost than before. Maybe the deal was that he in some inexplainable way felt comfortable with all the troubles. Even if it hurt him, they were familiar hurts.

"The squonk would weep and dissolve even before I could say a single word of comfort to him," she added, then looked ahead. They were arriving in familiar surroundings and she caught scent of some of her packmates already. Somebody had left a mark right outside the borders, the Sovereign stopped to leave something as well, then turned back to the girl. "We have arrived," Wraen told her. "I would offer you to show around, but I will take you to a place, where you can take a rest first," she said. "Come along."

Thank you for the thread! Maybe you can fade out in your next post!

She guessed that was true, but she'd probably try anyway.  If what she said was true, though, and it only took words, probably she wouldn't be able to make a friend out of one either.  She wouldn't chase one, but you couldn't be friends with a creature without talking to them!

It was a good story, but before she could say anything else, Wraen was stopping.  Fennec sensed it and paused as well, listening to her surroundings as Wraen announced they were there.  Okay.  Thanks.  Now that they were here, it dawned on her how tired she actually was, and she eagerly followed to wherever Wraen was taking her.  She could explore after a nap.