Phoenix Maplewood b is for basil assaulted by bears

Backdated, exact timeline is flexible!

Gideon ran and ran and ran.

He ran even though his legs screamed for him to stop. He ran until he was panting so hard that drool gathered in the corners of his lips and frothed with the effort of breathing. He ran until he physically could not, until the point where his lungs felt like they were tearing and his heart felt like it might explode, and then he collapsed.

The canopy rustled overhead, green leaves tinged at the edges with shades of yellow and orange and red to herald the coming of autumn. Wasps and dragonflies flitted among the boughs. Birdsong filled gaps in Gideon's ragged breathing. He pressed his ears to his skull and heaved in great gasps, willing strength back into his body. Somewhere nearby was the burbling of a brook. Once he was able to support himself on shaky legs, he trudged toward it.

He was unable, in his blinding fear, to appreciate the beauty of the forest in which he found himself. Instead, his ears and eyes darted around, alert and ready for the sounds of pursuit. It might take Isra seconds or hours to realize he had run off, and Gideon was not willing to gamble on which was more likely. He bent over the water and drank heavily and quickly, pausing only to gasp for more fleeting breath, and soon his stomach was stretched and chilled from it.

Then, having overindulged, he promptly turned and retched it all up on the bank.

note 2 self: set before his raid

a single eye in its flat ugly set saw not the beauty of the maplewood, but what it could provide for him. the brush of leaves might have been fat birds settling in high branches. shifting of verdancy to autumnal color only provided breaking cover for the multihued foxes, shedding summer for fall.

insects were crushed underfoot, others winging from his hateful tread with self-preservative speed; finches and catbirds quieted. yikaas was a blight upon the splendid wood, hunger and irritation driving him to hunt for those caught in his lair.

someone drank water in desperate gulps. the caribou hunter knew that sensation of complete empty dread, forced to stop only when your body threatened its collapse.

water splashed from weakened stomach and open jaws, flowing in sloppy waves back into the mud. yikaas regarded the boy with the remaining slate-blue eye, thrusting his muzzle close.

ghelan would be this age now. and like the leg of his son, nature had twisted this boy too into a trick of itself; two tails. an treacherous sense of loss gnawed at yikaas, invaded him. 

and there it was again, some glissade of recognition, the same he had experienced upon capturing the young woman and seeing her near the injured wolf. he said nothing more, only watched the child with some sternness.

Gideon was deafened by the sound of water splattering on the bank and his own heartbeat in his ears. Then there was the static rush of weakness that came along with emptying one's stomach. He heard nothing of the man's approach. Feeling worse than he had before he stopped to drink, the boy reeled back and turned, only to find himself face-to-face with a stormy cyclopean stare set in a grim black face.

His first instinct in his vulnerable state was to quail, but his mother's voice came to him. They wouldn't try anything against how brave you are. It was terribly difficult to feel brave when his legs were shaking and his breath was still coming in huffs and puffs and he felt weak from vomiting, but he got to his feet all the same and gave his tails a little lash.

You better not mess with me! he said as boldly as he could, fixing Yikaas with a stare that would make Anselm proud. If he had only said that to Isra, then maybe she would have left him alone too. This guy was even more frightening than her, his stare hard and cold as mountain stone. Gideon's throat trembled with a nervous gulp.

it was a good display. his cruel mouth curved in spite of itself. all he saw for a moment was ghelan, ghelan. his lanzadoii son.

eyes for a moment lifted now in the far-off direction of moontide. red leaf and their son lived on those shores, and to torment himself, yikaas often imagined the handsome seal hunter beside them.

bile limned his throat. why did this boy's framing make him aware that he had seen the interplay of charcoal and gold at least once before?

"where mother? where father?" he asked suddenly in a raven's guttural voice. anymore, when yikaas spoke it was to himself, and he spoke only lanzadoii then. common words were starting to evade him once more.

The stranger's eye lifted off to a distant horizon. Gideon couldn't help but to turn his gaze in the same direction, revealing his childish inexperience by taking his eyes off his opponent. So easy it was to disarm him with the curving of dark lips in the suggestion of a smile. Gideon unwittingly revealed what sort of life he had led up until this moment.

A happy one. A trusting one. One in which he had had no reason to be guarded around those who smiled with him.

The man spoke in a heavy, broken accent that brought Anselm surging to the forefront of Gideon's mind. Not only because of the question. Theirs were not similar in the slightest, yet he found comfortable familiarity in hearing an accented voice.

Gideon himself held a touch of his father's accent. Ezra spoke with much more of it; his was but a whisper below his boyish trill. Mom's... Gone, he said, for although Yikaas had effectively disarmed him with a faint smile and an accent, he knew he could not go back to Rivenwood until the threat of Isra was gone, and so he could not let this stranger return him there.

I'm sorry, mama, he wept inside. God, please please tell mama I'm sorry and I love her and I wanna come home soon.

Dad, he... Amadeo was... Well, he stammered, frustrated by his inability to piece his thoughts into something coherent. It did not occur to him Yikaas would have no clue who he was talking about. They fought, I think. He's gone too.

yikaas prevailed in this moment; pleased with himself, he continued his observant listening. 

something familiar in that voice; its little teeth gnawed at the caribou man, irritating him. he did not know it, and yet he did.

mom. dad. amadeo. a fight. a flight. gone. alone.

a soft boy, like ghelan. injured by some design their fathers could not stop, like his son. 

like ghaden.

yikaas saw something in this. he tilted his head to one side, inched closer in the manner of a goblin clutching a toadstool; "i have wife. have son. he has your age," he said, his heart aching in relief as he spoke of ghelan. "taken from me. them. and one eye," he hissed, leaning back as rough paw lifted to the base of his own empty socket. "alone. to be alone, hm. to learn to like? good. strong."

The man had a wife and a son that had been taken from him along with his eye. Though he was too young in the world for the emotion welling in him to be accurately named sympathy, Gideon certainly felt something for Yikaas upon learning this. How awful it must be to lose everything like that.

Gideon felt he could relate, though the thing keeping him from his family was not a force of violence. Rather, it was the fear of being taken again, and worse, the fear Isra might hurt one of his family membrs to do so. The questions she had asked led him to believe he was of particular interest to her; at least if he kept away, they would be safe, and he could return when he was sure enough time had passed.

How long would that be? He had no way of knowing.

Who took them? Gideon wondered, deciding then and there that "Them" must be the bad guys and Yikaas was a little bit like him. Lost, yearning for his family, hoping to reunite with them one day. He found it difficult to parse the meaning of what the man said next and assumed he meant that being alone made one strong. Well, he couldn't argue with that. He didn't know if that was true, but this fellow certainly looked powerful enough.

I want to be strong, he said. How?

"you come with me. i teach you."

a gambit. a branch extended toward a lost boy. yikaas entertained no ideas that the child could replace the son he had been forced away from, the son who lived with his treacherous mother in moontide and surely was being raised by the seal hunters even now.

robbed twice, then!

robbed three times!

yikaas turned away as if to leave. a pair of steps sounded in the undergrowth, light, and then he turned back. "moonwolves took them."

the gold eyes. it was the eyes. to whom did they belong? and where had he seen them before?