Sunspire Mountains You know we could put them all to shame

This can wait til whenever, I know we have one, I just had muse! <3 Set just outside Sunbeam Lair

Numbed by her grief, Reverie had made a decision.

In The Gilded Sea, they had always followed the trail set by their herald; their pathfinder. Leader, guardian, trailblazer. That role had belonged to her father once. Of all the Medeiros siblings, only Atlas and Tybault had been meant to step into his place. Trained for it. Some part of her had assumed that Everett would take up the mantle now, in Tybault's absence.

The more she thought about it, the less sense it made. Was she not their leader? Their guide? Was this role not her right?

She'd departed the Emberwood with a soft word to her brother, a howl to inform the rest. On the way she'd found @Dusty Rose, inviting him wordlessly to pursue her into the wilds. To catch her, if he could.

Reverie cut a swift path from the valley, a wildfire blazing into the mountains beyond. The rain fell endlessly. Her hackles bristled all along her spine as she came to the mouth of the cave, shoulders tensing in recognition. For a moment she was frozen in place, simply staring into the dim expanse.

The scent of blood filled the air.

It was just a little uncomfortable to leave the kids behind, and that made Dusty Rose uncomfortable because they weren't his kids, were they? And if Reverie was fine with it, why shouldn't he be fine with it, too?

He followed doggedly in her wake, too wary and preoccupied to put much sport into it. Pleased as he was to be along for the ride, he was still settling into this new paradigm. So he was surprised when he caught up, and very quickly bristling, himself.

"Rainsong?" he said, his voice soft and low as he came up beside her. His aphotic gaze was directed toward the shadows of the cave. "Did you hear something?"

Rainsong. She was comforted by the sound of Dusty Rose's voice, the warm feeling of his presence at her side. Reverie shifted wordlessly to press her flank against his, cheek resting against the side of his neck for a moment. Her bristling died away as she began to settle.

Like a drug he soothed her weeping hurts to a soft, pleasant hum. He didn't even have to try. She hated that, just a little.

No, She murmured, voice hollow. She pressed her face further into his fur, muffled when she added after a small pause:

My father is dead.

A slow breath; she drew away slightly as she continued. My real father. The one I chose. He died, and I wasn't there. I didn't even know.

Her voice cracked on the last word, but the tears did not fall yet.

The coywolf had always been just a little bit skeptical about Dad and the flower eater's relationship. Not that he didn't believe in love or anything — he knew they loved him, after all. Their romance had just struck him over and over again as too good to be true. As manufactured, because they were both in need of something that didn't truly exist. No one was made for anyone else. They just had to find someone to match up their selfish bits to as best as they could.

Right?

So Dusty Rose regarded Reverie with a suspicious squint for a moment after she'd spoken, uncomfortable with the sweep of empathy and kinship he'd felt in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to say something like, Tough shit or That's rough, buddy, but the words wouldn't come out the way he wanted them to.

"What did you do for the dead on the plains?" he asked her instead.

Her gaze darkened as she recalled Rose and the rites she had never received. Because of her, Ophelia and her sickness, her weakness, the shame she brought to her proud family. What so few wolves understood was that there were no others in The Gilded Sea, never for very long at least. Only the Medeiros family stayed; only they survived. There was pride in that, one soiled by the failure of two sisters.

Now it was all lost to the fire. She wasn't sorry to see it gone.

We were meant to - to dance. The dancers were, anyway, but not to call the rain, Their grief had not been a soft thing. We never got the chance. And I'm not sad about that. We were meant to call the fire.

Blood on the altar; blood wrung from the land. Retribution as much as oblation, but neither, truly. The Gilded Sea was subject to no whims but those of its gods, and they were only beggars at the doorstep of divinity. The gods dealt in rusty quarters and pitying smiles by turns.

What did you do in the desert?

Dusty Rose understood little of the division between Singers and Dancers, but given what he'd heard about them, he knew the division existed. He wondered about it, now, and about who they'd never gotten to dance for and why, and when, and what Reverie wanted to do now.

At her question, he gave a small shake of his head — Nothing. But what he said was, "We would cry together. Sing to each other. Hold each other close."

But there has been no funeral rights performed for the sake of the dead. They had no notion of afterlife in his culture. The dead were lost to them, and their bodies considered anywhere from a liability to their next meal.

"Mine, too," he said to her. "Dad. Not my blood, but the one who chose to love me. And the flower eater — that's his name. My blood father. But the flower eater doesn't think of us the same. We all belonged to Dad. Now we don't belong to no one."

He turned his face into Reverie's fur, wishing he could take the words back almost at once.

"It gets easier," he said after a moment of thought. "But not for a long time."

Though he shook his head as if the words he spoke were insignificant, Reverie was struck by the simple sincerity of it. The beauty of it. She might have said as much, but then he went on and she went still and the world went quiet all around them. Or at least it seemed that way.

Now we don't belong to no one.

You could belong to me.

But she would never dare speak it. That just wasn't them. He took; she gave. She was beginning to realize that she would give him everything if he would only stay. She was beginning to realize that she was dancing to call the fire, that she had been all along, and wasn't that ironic?

After a moment she turned to embrace him, peppering gentle kisses across his brow and along his cheekbones. She didn't say anything. She only held him. It did get easier. The sea of grass always rose again, green turning to gold, in the wake of every fire.

But they were people, not grass, and people don't need to grow anew. They only need to heal. This is how they heal.

He huffed to express his displeasure, though it was difficult to be displeased with any show of affection. Still, he was the one doing the comforting here, thank you very much! So he arranged them as forcefully as he could so that he was the one showing affection to her.

"Wanna tell me about him?" he asked her, straining to keep his focus.

Reverie giggled softly as Dusty Rose insistently reversed their roles, but surrendered to it easily. There was a small streak of surprise in her, but otherwise the crumbling of the wall she'd placed around their roles to one another was a quiet thing. She hadn't even needed to ask. He gave; she took.

So Reverie would spend the remainder of the day recounting tales from her time in the valley, her time with Gunnar and all that had happened between, until the sun began to set and she realized there were no more tales to tell. She'd told him everything. From that chapter of her life, at least; the part that had belonged to Kvarsheim and her family there.

It felt freeing.