Emberwood The kids aren't all right.

Small PP, hope it is okay to include Tuathal! If not I can edit him out, no worries. Let me know.

Blood and mud soaked her paws, streaked up along her ankles like war paint, and her face was tinged with red where Ibis had been trying so desperately to make the situation right. Her eyes were half-lidded and unfocused, but she had @Tuathal alongside her body for support. It was almost like having her brother back — and on more than one occasion when the older man asked her for directions to her home, she mistakenly murmured something about the Willows, the Hollow, taking them on a meandering path south in the long run. Whenever Ibis composed herself she would have no memory of the trip from the cache to the Emberwood; nor should she really, it was a blur of trees and trauma.

When they passed over the border together she did finally stop. She stared grimly at the sigil carved in one of the white-barked trees, thinking it was pretty, but nothing deeper. She was still shaking despite the warmth of the man's coat, and refused to budge from his side. Truthfully she could not get the image of the dead body out of her mind — every blink was a shock to her system, and the only comfort so far came in the form of the rogue man.

They had finally somehow found their way back to somewhere familiar to the girl, an honest miracle, given the messed up state of them both. He hadn't counted how many wrong turns they had taken, nor how many times the child had made them retrace and correct their steps to find a path vaguely correct, until another correction was made. At one point he'd forced them to take the long way back South after they'd wound up at the vacant swath of some willows, to spare them from the agony of passing through the cache again. The detour had cost them time, but time wasn't very precious, when the only deadline you had to meet was survive and keep your sanity screwed on tight.

When she stopped, he followed her gaze as she trailed to the scratchings on a tree, much like the one's she had described for him in broken language throughout their trip. A flower of some sort, and he murmured, "That's pretty," but fell otherwise silent. Ibis was of more concern to him, now that they'd come to her home. Her small body shivered against his side, and he pressed in tighter, unabashed to wrap his foreleg around her as a father would his daughter, or a brother his sister, to let her rest in the warmer cavity of his chest.

"What do we do now?" the answer was obvious, but the answer seemed difficult to find.

He remarked on the sigil, and Ibis would've boasted that it had been Reiko's idea, then maybe thrown in some anecdotal information about their claim of the marsh and the migration, but it all sounded so complicated. She looked at the dirt instead, folding against Tuathal when he draped a foreleg across her and pulled her close. She was easily dwarfed by the older man but that didn't bother her; the feeling of his chest and the shifting of his fur was a comfort, as was the steady beat of his heart that she couldn't help but overhear at this proximity.

Then he asked, What do we do now?

Ibis didn't know. She should've known. She was the Archdruid of this forest, after all. What do newcomers do on a pack's borders? But she was not a newcomer... The shock wasn't leaving her system yet. She was tired, and staring at the dirt... But finally managed to gather enough energy together to say softly, We call for... Someone. Which was a vague instruction. Ibis could have called for anyone at all, even merely called out and waited, but she couldn't find it in herself to raise her voice. A few seconds pass and she's breathing in Tuathal's musk, feeling his warmth bleed in to her, and manages to say the name: @Kukulkan?

Was he even here? Hadn't he -- and Bhediya too -- they weren't back from their trip, were they? How long had she been gone...?

Ah. Silence came from the girl, but by now, Tuathal had learned to expect that drawn out pause before an answer. He stayed quiet himself, and focused on their bright surroundings. Hoarfrost clung to the trees, sharp white against a dull grey sky. Yet the girl had called this Emberwood. He could only imagine what this place must look like in summer.

His ears twitched forward when her voice finally came, her solution, so simple, he wondered how long until the shock would wear out of him. "Someone...?" Tuathal murmured, and let her rest until she spoke again. A word he thought was gibberish, through the fog of her mind and the muffler of his fur, but realized, then, that it had been a name.

Tuathal fell quiet for a moment - because he hadn't completely caught all the syllables, or... maybe he'd caught too many. Ah... well, perhaps she would muster her strength, and flood the air with that strange name again. But the girl just stayed quiet, and Tuathal... well, he couldn't bring himself to ask the kid to repeat the name again. She had hardly managed to give him anything the first time.

This would not turn out well, but he tipped his head anyway, parted his mouth, straightened up to get all the air he could muster for the shout of that name, and summoned... "Kukukuklanakan?" ... a demon, probably. With his breath on the air, and whatever he'd beckoned probably on its frothing way, he allowed himself to collapse once more into his usual slack and slouching posture. "Whoever this friend is, they've gotta get themselves a nickname." And the faintest smile somehow tugged at his lips. The irony, that these words would be his.

The longer they lingered together the warmer she felt, thus the better she felt, although there was still that pit in her belly and that hollowness where her heart was. This emptiness caused by shock. Gradually - as the man tried to summon aid and then spoke - Ibis could try to focus her thoughts. She remembered that Kukulkan wouldn't be home yet... He was off with Bhediya at the meeting with Courtfall, or in the process of returning, she couldn't tell how long the travelers had been gone. How long had she been gone? A day? Two or three? How had she gotten home...?

Blink, blink, stare. The emblem of the flower upon the tree helped her to refocus too, and she nosed deeper among the fur of Tuathal's chest. Please.. stay, until... but she didn't finish the request, finding her tongue heavy and the sound of her voice too hard on her own ears. It was like someone else was speaking through her and she didn't like it. Maybe @Kavik would come instead, or @Marten, or -- there were so many names and faces drifting through her thoughts and it was overwhelming; each time she thought of her friends she imagined them in the mud, crusted with ice, rotting -- wrong, it was all wrong.

Something sinister was lurking within Ibis; it had affixed itself to her in those first few moments after finding the body. It had worked its way through her skin, through her breath, to her blood, her heart - and in the mess of moments leading her home, it festered. The continued feeling of dread and loss and wrongness persisted until this precise moment: during which she dropped to the dirt, fainting against the older man's chest.

but it wasn't kukulkan who'd arrived first, but marten, who was only in the area by chance. marten had kept low, quiet, as always, still battling his own inner demons while trying to remain useful. he contributed to caches, worked on his own medicine stock (though it was measly, in the winter) and patrolled borders. but made friends? ... not quite. 

when he heard the howl he came at a run, alarmed by a voice he didn't recognize and the state of urgency within it. he brought cobwebs, because it was all he had available -- he'd taken all the poppy seeds himself as soon as he'd found them -- and arrived with ears pricked upwards. ibis. he breathed her name, but did not pause to gawk. 

he looked between the two wolves. what happened? what's wrong?? he asked, so he could do as much help as he could as soon as possible.

Tuathal had half a mind to leave. Get away from this place, get away anywhere but this side of the mountain. He'd been better off in the west. At least the only demons that haunted him there were already dead.

But he also knew he couldn't leave her. This feeble girl, with her feeble words. She sounded so small, but her voice clambered over the walls of his concrete heart and tumbled down into the rubble, a tired heap, on the other side. Tuathal touched his nose to her crown. "Don't worry, I'll stay..." not forever.

He hardly squeezed out his words when her weight changed against him. Her frailty shifted to something quite heavy, and he gasped a small breath, and repositioned his leg to catch her.

"Kid?" he murmured, at the same time a new voice coloured the silence, and he realized they had never exchanged names. Too late for that now. Tuathal stole a forward glance, and settled his golden eyes on the newcomer - Kukulkan, he presumed - who had joined them them with cobwebs, and attention, and a great many questions.

The relation fell into place. Must be the pack's healer. Tuathal motioned for Kukulkan to come closer. He felt stiff from the effort of keeping Ibis propped against him but he continued to cradle her, as if she was his sister, his child. "Found a body, somewhere North of here," the words tasted heavy on his tongue. "Dammit." he cursed underbreath.

Why her?

It was all too much, and she should have known better. The world outside of Elysium, outside of the Hollow, the one that Mal tried to warn her about, and the one which had stolen her brother away - her mother, her father, every bit of her world -- it was all too much. The little girl should have known better than to trust in the universe; alas, her innocence had come at a cost.

Ibis had not been prepared for any part of life without her parents. She liked to think of herself as an adventurer, but adventurers did not require the constant presence of a brother at their flank, a Paladin; she was no adventurer, no warrior. A damsel in a glass tower, maybe. She had thought of herself as worldly for having travelled across the valley but that too was a lie. Ibis knew as much about the world as a fish might about dry land.

And now look at her. Asleep at the breast of a strange man. Her mind reeling from the shock of her dark discovery, even while she slept. Trying so hard to prove her worth to a gaggle of strangers who need not pledge themselves to her; desperate for affection, for family, having given it all up -- that glass tower splintering slowly, until this moment. A life shattered to pieces. Dashed upon rocks, buried in the snow.

No, that wasn't her. That was the dead woman - the body. Ibis couldn't tell them apart within her dream (if that's even what you would call this state of flux, this slumbering she could not wake from). Her breathing slowed; her thin sides undulated at an irregular tempo and then calmed, slow, so slow, and as she slipped deeper in to this dream state, she found some sense of peace.

Ibis would not wake.