Jade Fern Grove tronkova

for anyone! assume mahler is either visible or within earshot <3

heda had begged and pestered their leader to take her with him outside the territory. mahler had told her several times that rivenwood had no dearth of things to explore, but she was determined. and today she was successful. he took one look at the girl prepared to argue her case yet again and relented at once.
the grove was deep and cool. instructed by the graf not to stray from a limited area, mahler began to gather herbs along the fringes of the territory.
for some reason, she thought of the strange girl by the water, and wondered where she had gone.

after meeting druidin, sometime later he decided the children were not so bad. it did not mean he didn’t submit many subjects into his mental centrifuge to conclude on someone to blame. gingerly he peeked thru the leaves where he knew the children had yet to leave.

maybe he will join their rendezvous. “zu vor mir,” he crisply said to no one. no one at all. he nearly misses mahler had left the bypass with a girl sämling. a bulb-flash smile as he remembers hunting with the graf what felt like a lifetime ago.

after asking the graf if he could approach the girl in the fen, “hallo.”

heda wandered after a promising scent. it reminded her of how cleetus' had been, which was upsetting. she veered away from it and almost stumbled into the tall legs of a wolf she had never met before. his voice was low; an answering "hallo" echoed from heda even before she could stop herself.
it was his scars, and beyond the scars, which she traced with her adventure-hungry gaze, it was a sense that he had been places and seen things she simply could not. heda tried to pull to mind the face of her mother. had nomi borne the same marks?
"'m heda," she mumbled, suddenly shy over the chosen moniker which had, until this point, sat rakish and roseate upon her head.

"hello, m'heda," he wouldn't admit it, but talking to the children was enjoyable for hm. he didn't have to say much, and if he did, he supposed they wouldn't understand. her eyes traced his scars like a sorely made maze in a kid's magazine, it was the first time he could remember being flustered over them. silently he thought of praimfaya. how did he earn these? "i like your name. ich heisse astraeus. what are you doing?"

whatever heda felt, it was not immediately identifiable as a crush. 
astraeus was polite, and more than that, he spoke those mysterious syllables taught by mahler. maybe he had said the words to everyone. 
"explorin'," she answered. "mahler told me not to go too far." the girl rolled her shoulders, and her eyes. then she snuck a look at astraeus, hoping he would not chide her for it.

AWWW :,o

astraeus breathed an amused chuff at heda's vocal dissent with mahler's policy. "mahler is right, he knows there are very dangerous things -- very dangerous men out there," his gaze feel, behind his eyes, milling through his first year as if a perversion of childhood nostalgia.

"do you want to hear a story?"

ikr ;;;

very dangerous men?
this only sharpened heda's interest. she wanted to ask how the men were dangerous, and what they looked like, and where they lived, so she could avoid them.
but he was offering a story. "yes," she said, tail swaying.