The Sunspire Act One, Melodrama

    One soft-footed step after another, head hanging low. She had hardly noticed the gradual rising of the land at first, and even as the slope grew steeper at first the increased strain upon her muscles only bled into the deep ache within her that penetrated to her very bones. It was only once her contracting muscles began to burn a little, searing in protest from the long distance traveled rather than from her turtle-like speed, that the lady wolf raised her dulled amber eyes and took a look around her, her gaze lackluster and uncomprehending. She had one white paw half-raised for her next weary step, and lifted it nearer her chest now, trembling. Its once-pristine nails were scarred and roughened by her travels, one of them with its delicate little tip even broken off entirely. Ordinarily this might have proven cause for more minute examination with the greatest of concern, but this day, this life was not an ordinary one, it plainly seemed to her emotion-hazed vision, and ordinary concerns were therefore summarily disregarded. She took in a sudden deep, shaky breath and (as if this was an act of great courage) stretched her upraised paw out before her to take another step, releasing her intake of air in a deep, heartfelt sigh. “Ohhhhh-oh-ohh-ohhh,” she moaned to herself, a tearful and high-pitched noise which was almost, but not quite, a puppyish whine. “Oh, me…”

    Her pace dragged onward and upward, her chin tucking itself automatically as her legs strained up the steepening grade. She hardly paid attention to whence she placed her feet, her chipped and broken nails digging in among the rocks and scree to propel her wearily onward. She no longer quite consciously knew why she toiled so, her thoughts preoccupied with wistfulness and sorrow. How, how had it ever come to this? She knew not where she was going any longer, nor where her life’s companions had gone; one by one they had floated away, like ghosts, and only gradually had it dawned upon her that even her last trailing pup had drifted off elsewhere, wearied by their endless toiling journey even as she herself was. It was probably for the best, she reflected, before sinking back down into the murky swamps of misery within her head. She was in no position to keep him from mischief now; she was hardly even in a position to care for her own broken body and heart. If she let herself pause for more than the merest moment, she suspected that she might simply sit down and stop there forever.

    As the skies darkened, the stars bedecked its blued expanse with glittering points that resembled scintillating diamonds, with hardly a cloud present to mar the sight. The night’s beauty was lost upon her, however, as she trailed upward still, taking note of its majesty only long enough to deepen her mourning. It was tragic, truly tragic, that such beauty was so lost upon her! She would have wept over it if only her wretched eyes had any tears to spare. Tragic. Her feet stuttered to a halt and she looked around herself, blinking and bewildered, as it dawned slowly upon her that the slope had given up its own endless climb, and the wide span of gravel before her had given way to an infinite span of sky. She hesitated, and ventured another timorous pace forward, raising her eyes slowly to the heavens above, and feeling very small against their black extent lit only by those innumerable starry pinpricks gazing coldly back down at her. Ophelia stared apprehensively back at them, as her lower lip and jaw started to tremble. Then, unable to bear her own silent company one moment longer, she threw back her head and howled wildly, recklessly, without any regard for the intrusive rudeness of her action, her preoccupation-dulled nose not even having bothered to check if these lands already had a claimant. “Here I am still!” she cried, overwhelmed by theatrical levels of emotion, and playing them for all they were worth. “How could you have left me behind, my beloved?!” She threw back her nose, hyperextended her rearmost leg, and gazed long and sorrowful up, up at the blazing darkness of the skies and wished to lose herself in its beckoning embrace. Yes, save for those terrible sparkling bits of starry brightness (which she chose at the moment to selectively ignore), it was just as dark and empty as her very soul, she decided. …Her carefully overwrought stance and moue of distress, meantime, were just a little too artfully posed to be fully believed.

claudia i'll put you in your coffin ///////////////////////////////////////////// "It is just as well that you came with me, Madeline," the girl murmured, lengthening the stride of her young legs to keep pace with the reddish wolf who pressed close protectively. Oui, came the soft response. Your father would have not had it any other way. Claudia did not respond; perhaps it was the ignorance of her guardian's innocent words that caused silence to befall her lips, or further: perhaps it was that she had no words with which to rejoin Madeline. The heavenblue of her eyes swept the landscape as they passed through, missing little despite her small stature. The starlight caressed them both, cloaking Claudia in a seeming aureole of gold; this she did not notice, for her small lobes had swept forward at the piteous howl that pierced the veil of night. "Madeline!" the child hissed softly; bidden, the taller of the two figures, full-curved and yet innocent, halted her delicate step. As if one mind controlled them, the blunted muzzle of the child and the longer snout of the woman lifted to the darkened sky, scenting the air for whatever danger had wrung such an agonized sound from their nearby counterpart. Another child, in another time, would have felt the cold prickle of fear climb her spine, but Claudia was not that child and this was not that moment. Her tail flicked idly at her heels, then lifted in an arc of unconscious dominance; she commanded Madeline forward alongside her with nary a word, and together the two of them embraced the nightfall with a strange eagerness. It was not long before the drifting curtain of darkness, stippled with the jeweled tears high above them, revealed its secret; Claudia's eyes swept with cold intensity the graceful slimness of the weeping woman, beholding the beauty of her feminine figure. Not for the first time, a fierce bolt of jealousy plummeted through the child, a quarrel shot from the bow of some sadistic Cupid, but she shook it away, approaching the dejected figure with a child's fearlessness. "I have not heard such howling since I was thrown out from the Theatre," she observed dryly, and Madeline simpered a quiet chuckle, though she kept back from her delicate charge, ears and head lowered in abject submission. "For what do you weep?" Claudia demanded in her soft tone, edged in the accent of her homeland, but her eyes held all the malice and scrutiny of a much older being. aoves

She was growing more comfortable with the idea—that this was her mountain, the mountain of Tuatha Dé, a fierce tribe of warriors and druids. A family, closer than hers had ever been. Muirrin did not yet have many to follow her, but she had enough. Even if they were five, even if they were three—it was enough. It was better than being alone, slowly going hungry and slowly dying. From that small number, they would grow stronger and larger, a force not to be trifled with. A tribe intimately intwined with the earth and one another. She knew this, and so Muirrin had returned to the place that would be hers, to begin preparations for the day when they would become pack.

Muirrin slumbered within one of the rocky caverns, at the edge of where the grassy slope met the harsh wall of stone. It was a good place, sheltered from the weather—dark and warm. "Ohhhhh-oh-ohh-ohhh," the wind sighed, though it was not the soothing call of ancestors... but the high-pitched shriek of banshees. Muirrin, now wakened, growled and moved to her paws. They foretold of death, she knew, and though there was little one could do to stop it (at least, according to legend), the Blackthorn fully intended to try.

Her sleek form moved down the slope, her pace swift and solid. “How could you have left me behind, my beloved?!” came the wind's next cry, and Muirrin paused, her golden eyes scanning the dusk for the source. A ghost? But that could not be right; she had heard ghosts before, but had never known them to speak words that she could comprehend. More voices followed, but they did not carry the same hysterical intensity as the voice before, and Muirrin could not make out the words. For a moment, she pondered returning to her cave—but no. My mountain, she thought, and resumed her swift pace until she came upon the culprits.

She had arrived in time to hear the last syllables of the child's question, and rather than speak, Muirrin remained still—her posture tall, tail high—to observe and assess the situation unfolding on her front lawn.

    Those heartless stars above her made no reply to her plaintive cry, but another shortly did. With measured grace, holding her silence for the moment, she turned her sorrowful mien toward the speaker, figuring the stranger could easily see the hollowness within her mournful gilded eyes in the moonlight’s soft glow. So young, so beautiful, and yet filled with such suffering! The mere sight was enough to break any wolf’s heart, surely. Even a very young one who had not been driven to descend into the depths of despair as had she by the vagaries of life. She allowed the echoing quiet of the night to build between them for a moment longer before replying in a quavery voice. Her head drooped toward the earth, as if the mere utterance of words was such an effort that she had to give over the energy that had kept her slack neck straight in order to speak aloud. “O, young Mistress, ’tis not a matter for levity, I fear. I weep because my one true love is gone, lost to me forever by the merciless cruel hand of Fate herself!”

    To speak of the matter wrenched at her heart anew, and the slight swaying of her willowy frame was not entirely feigned. She threw back her head with the smallest and softest of wretched moans, and allowed her hindquarters to dip, catching herself in an uncomfortable half-sit which she allowed to slump into a half-recline. The child’s eyes seemed as hard and cruel as those unforgiving stars above, such that Ophelia could not bear to look at them. She gazed off into the night, her eyes dulled with sadness as they slowly traversed the landscape with its moon-etched silhouettes. They came at last to the more authoritative figure who had now entered the scene, a wolf-gray bitch who stood watching them with her tail held assertively high. Ophelia’s eyes were almost cartoonishly large and sad, and her head gave a slight cant as she gazed with wretched desperation at this second stranger. Her voice was soft and breathless, her words like to be snatched away at any moment by an errant wash of wind. “Have you too come to mock my words, foreigner, or rather to offer comfort in my trials of distress?” She surmised there was a passing chance the two were related, or that the elder was at least here to check up on the wayward youngster; as the elder of the two held her tongue, confirmation of this thought would have to wait until speech was elicited and the presence of a similar accent either confirmed or denied. Ophelia’s own muzzle tilted upward an anxious fraction of an inch, a pose aping that of a loyal supplicant and baring the pearly-white fur of her throat a little more. Her neck kinked a little and grew stiffer, sitting there like that, but she sat and suffered these physical pangs silently, in favor of voicing the more painful and emotion-charged notion that had just crossed her mind. “Or are you of the silent footsteps,” (for she hadn’t heard the other’s arrival—could she be a ghost, or potentially a reaper? Or another of those creatures she had once heard tales told of,) “perhaps here to take me to the other world whence the spirit of my beloved has crossed? Oh, to be reunited with him now! ’Twould be the most welcome of mercies, if it were so.” Agony and hope warred in her expression, as if she dared not let one or the other win for fear it would overcome her entirely.

claudia i'll put you in your coffin ///////////////////////////////////////////// "Love does not exist." The child watched the grief-stricken wolf with growing interest; the jealousy grew stronger as she beheld the movements of the fine curved limbs, the beauty of the woman's arrangement upon the ground. She so desired that for herself — a gentle sound from Madeline drew her from her reverie. Claudia's head snapped 'round at the arrival of the new woman — so focused had she been on the crying wisp that she had not heard the other's arrival. Cursing herself for such weakness, the golden child fixed the newcomer with the cold skies of her gaze, directly searching for the answering orbs in the face opposite her. "Such dramatics unfold before you, yet you are unmoved," she observed aloud, her tone dry. "I would comfort her, but I am afraid she will infect me with her insipid grief." There came then a high, bell-like ringing of a laugh, the mirth of a small child, but there lurked therein the aged bitterness of a woman, and it was not toward the pathetic lovely thing upon the grass at which it was directed. No; Claudia laughed toward the woman cloaked in greyscale this time of the eve, vaguely mocking, her tiny cub's-body still holding a commanding air which mirrored that of the mountain's ruler. "I am Claudia," the gilded girl called at length. "This is Madeline —" here she indicated her guardian, the slim lovely French thing, clothed in tresses of dark red, with the emerald of her eyes glinting like secrets in the shadows, where she had turned them demurely. "We are newcomers to these lands, and seek sanctuary." Casting one last glance at the crying minx, Claudia approached the one who she knew to be in control of this place, or sensed such. Madeline followed, her attention only for her small charge, and the little one gazed up at the mysterious stranger with a small cool smile graven upon her lips. aoves

It wasn't that Muirrin was unmoved—she simply was at a loss about how to deal with the drama unfolding before her. She had never heard or seen anything like it and, frankly, it seemed quite a bit over the top. Even when her grandfather—the figure in her life held most dear—had fallen beyond the veil to be claimed by the Otherworld, Muirrin's grief had not manifested itself in this way. No, it wasn't that the Blackthorn was unmoved or unconcerned. She simply could not relate.

Her eyes narrowed, then turned to the child who's laughter made the fur raise along the her back. Were the fey playing tricks on her this night? For the events unfolding did not seem natural in Muirrin's perception; still, she remained quiet, calculating her interaction with these creatures precisely. If they were of the Otherworld, it would be their intention to capture her—for a night or for a week, it would not matter, for when she would be allowed to return to this world a hundred years would have passed.

The child moved towards her, then, with an older woman close behind her steps. Muirrin stood taller, tensing—how could a babe command a grown wolf in such a way? No, there was something notably off about this encounter, and the Blackthorn did not like it. "Come no closer," she warned the pair, for the moment ignoring the wails of the third stranger. Again, the child laughed, before beckoning her chaperone to come away. Muirrin did not move until they were a considerable distance away, and then even as she approached the grief-stricken woman her eyes never quite left their retreating forms.

"What happened, exactly?" she queried, doing her best to use soothing tones. Regardless of the current melodrama, if there was something dangerous near her territory, Muirrin wanted to know of it. Wildcats, perhaps? They had been known to attack wolves when desperate, and without a pack a wolf would be lucky to come away unharmed.

    Love does not exist. Simple words—so cynical and world-weary, and yet they rang against her consciousness with the bright, harsh knell of truth. “No,” she murmured, though more to herself than to this wretched little apparition of a pup, and the words were not ones of denial but of agreement: “No, no longer. Once, perhaps, what seems now long ago, but… Love does not exist anymore for me. Not in this world.” She felt her heart cracking open wider yet as she spoke those words, and again the sorrowful droop of her head was not entirely a trick. No, it was only a little feigned, which many who’d known her better would have to admit was something of an improvement over her usual style.

    An explosively dramatic sigh, the forcefully loud exhalation of air from her lungs that would have seemed a tornado in miniature to any unfortunate insect caught up within it, and she dropped bonelessly to the earth like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Numbly, she let the others’ words flow over her, in one ear and out the other. She was no longer entirely certain what was real and what was imagined of the sensations her senses were offering her, if the younger wolf or the elder or both were ethereal or corporeal or what. And she wasn’t entirely sure she cared. What did it matter? What did anything matter, anymore, after all she had been through? How could she continue with half of herself missing?

    Theatrically, that’s how—or so the answer still seemed to be to any impartial observer. Ophelia had never been averse to playing the martyr, and even if her grief was for once tinged with the tincture of genuine despair, well, at least it was all the better an excuse to steal the spotlight and prostrate herself such that all for miles around would feel as sorrowful and wretched as she did. And if Ophelia did not think of it quite so clearly to herself in those terms, there was nonetheless still a little too much deliberate artfulness in the way she curved her wrist to better display her poor battered foot, once so perfect and now, with its roughened and split nails and coarsely toughened pawpads, seeming nearly as battered as her heart itself felt. Now that was a tragedy: not only to be feeling so wretched, but to have to look wretched whilst feeling so? Oh! it was too much to bear, truly it was. “I fear I have no sanctuary to offer you, or anyone else,” she murmured softly in a daze to the little one, who was already leaving her for the other, saner, and more powerful figure. And then with an effort Ophelia half-raised her head a moment later at the older and more sensible wolf’s question as the other approached. “Ohhhh,” moaned Ophelia. “I am not certain I can bear to speak of it! Even now my heart bleeds itself dry at the very memories…” Yet despite her words she sat up just a little more and scooted her other forefoot over neatly beside the other. The motions seemed to nudge at the observer: See, see what terrible trials I have been through? My formerly perfect feet, of such pure and pristine white, and now look at them! Look at me! Ophelia’s lips and lower jaw trembled for just an instant’s pause before, contrary to her words, she launched loquaciously into her tale.

    “Oh, it is not a story for the faint of heart to endure! And yet I fear that is all I have become now in its wake: faint-hearted, worn-out, worthless. My love and I, we met in a warm sunlight meadow, among the serenading birds and bees and the summery perfume of a thousand wildflowers. It was love at first sight, though it took a bit longer for us to confess such to one another; I was quite the shy young maid at the time, and my beloved in matters of the heart himself not much more worldly, you see. Our love blossomed just as had those flowers, and proved even more intoxicating to the senses— but alas, I fear my family was too hard-hearted, too callous and brutalized by the cares of the world to understand! They disapproved of my beloved and insisted I ne’er call upon him again. But instead I fled my pack of birth to start a newer and truer one with my love, one that would be founded on true love and understanding and therefore stand the test of time. But I fear Fate was a much crueler and capricious mistress than I realize, for ’twas not that long ago at all, for in short order she took both my puppies and my true love from me!” Ophelia swayed in place, true emotions swelling and threatening to overcome her again. “Oh, oh me! He was so gallant, so brave, trying to protect me and my children; if only I had known,” she sobbed.

Although Muirrin was still wary of the hysterical creature she was currently met with, she found a curiosity growing in her heart—for the ambitious Blackthorn was a wolf that could be won with a good story told, and the stranger was proving to be quite talented (if not a bit over the top). Despite her initial wariness of the situation (and to be sure, it still existed somewhere within the agouti female's mind), Muirrin found herself quite enraptured by the other woman's tale—that is, once she finally began. Still, the question the mountain-dweller had asked of the other was not answered when the bard (as Muirrin was beginning to think of her as) fell silent.

"I am sorry for your losses," the woman told the other with sincerity; to lose a mate and children in one fell swoop (as was implied) was a grievous event indeed. It seemed to Muirrin that asking bluntly how Fate had taken them from the woman would only invite more hysterics and unintelligible words, so she ventured with, "What was your brave knight protecting you from?" This, at least, would encourage more of the story to come forth (at least, this was her hope) and might even clue her in on what danger might be afoot.