Sea Lion Shores Saw you there and I thought

All welcome but open for @Charon if he'd like it for Naturalism. :)

Although she hadn't been to the ocean before, Saena understood it. She understood the way it undulated, knew that the moon overhead had something to do with it. Her toes curled into the damp sand underfoot as she stared out at it, taking in its rhythmic crash and pull and finding herself lulled into a sense of security by it. She wasn't in any danger—Stavanger Bay was nearby, but she wasn't close enough to pose a thread and besides, the pack was a friend to Blacktail Deer Plateau. She wasn't worried.

A dream she'd had months ago leaped to the forefront of her mind:

"The moon bends the water," said the dog-headed swan, motioning to the dream ocean, which was pink in colour and was rising and falling rapidly. The tides were occurring over a much shorter timespan than normal, nearly 100-fold its regular rate, so that Saena could stand there and observe it, though it should have taken many hours. "When the moon is near it pulls the water upward, and when it is far, the water sinks."

"What makes the water move toward it?" a younger Saena asked innocently, but the simorgh just shook its head. "Nobody knows. Some say it is the attraction of sea and moon spirits. Others say the ocean contains dust from the moon, and the dust seeks to return, but is trapped in the water which it pulls."

Personally, she believed the former theory. Lasher had made clear to her that spirits existed, so it seemed more likely that the spirits of the sea and the moon yearned to join, and so the sea and moon rose toward and fell away from one another. Her dreams, while inexplicable, were an enormous help to Saena's trade as a Naturalist. There was no way she could have theorized what made the sea move without the help of the goddess she dreamt of. She had her mother to thank for that skill, but she'd never know that.

Somewhere in the near distance, seals bellowed loudly. Her concentration seemed to snap like a wire pulled too taut when two large males smashed into one another. She turned her head to watch with some interest as a fight broke out, presumably over a receptive female, if seals were anything like wolves.

It was the first time that Charon truly left Stavanger Bay's safe confines. Often he had come to the borders in the past month and some, teetering at the edge of the pack while trying to pluck up the courage to go. The first time he'd gone to the borders it had been in a foolish attempt to find Liyaní, but he had been stopped in his tracks by Ragnar. After that he had given up hope on finding his siblings, and had come to the borders looking for adventure, for thrill, for a whiff of Others and their packs.

It was strange leaving behind the line up to where Ragnar's scent reigned, leaving it for somewhere where no one in particular, and yet everyone all at once, marked the territories. Without realising it, Charon tensed his muscles, flattened his ears and tail against his body, and tiptoed further away from the Bay with a nauseous pit in his stomach, occasionally looking back. Luckily there was no one to see him, or so he hoped and thought, so that there was no one to call him a lousy scaredycat adventurer (for he obviously wasn't!).

When he heard the seals bellow nearby, the hairs in Charon's neck stood on end. He had only ever heard these kind of sounds from a distance, and always figured they came from monsters of some kind. Now that they were so close, he was terrified by them, and found himself starting to run, not minding where to; so long as it was away from the monsters!

It didn't take long before Charon saw another wolf came into view. Normally he wasn't so quick to trust Others, and he didn't think she was from the Bay since he hadn't seen her before, but right now Charon wasn't too picky. Besides, it wasn't like any Others had ever hurt him so far. Where normally Charon would try to tower over anyone he met until put in his place, now that he was scared, Charon kept himself small, flattening his ears against his head and tucking his tail between his legs. He licked his lips submissively while looking up at the female from the corners of his eyes, never making eye contact for longer than a second.

Charon didn't speak, waiting to see if the female was hostile or not, and hoping she'd protect him. He didn't look behind, for if he did then maybe he would see that the monster weren't really monsters and only had eye for each other anyway.

The larger male was winning, it seemed. Their fighting style was bizarre to Saena, who knew wolves sparred with their jaws and body language. Seals, it seemed, were more the clubbing sort. There was a lot of rumbling, their snouts raised to the sky, before one would lunge forward and smash into the other one. Perhaps they were biting, but from the distance and the size of their tiny mouths, Saena guessed they weren't. What damage could throwing one's blubbery body around really cause?

Apparently a lot, for the smaller male was soon retreating with slow, rolling flops. The victor was bellowing loudly before promptly collapsing on top of the prize, a much smaller female. At this, Saena looked away, and found herself looking at a young, freckled pup.

For a moment, a surge of fear crawled up her chest. Had Kisu settled down somewhere else and produced another child? The only wolves she'd seen with markings like Charon's were her brother and herself. She knew her markings came from her mother, but it didn't stop her temporary concern that it was her father's doing. That, or perhaps Pied wasn't dead after all, and had actually left her children with a false grave...

No, she thought as she stared questioningly at Charon, that would be ridiculous. "You look kinda like my brother," she said before she could stop herself. "He's a Warden. It takes a lot of bravery. Are you a Warden, too?" She didn't really know that Charon was spooked by the sound of the seals. He was looking away from her, but she supposed it was childish nervousness rather than actual fear. She'd been pretty shy as a kid, too.

The roaring intensified, then changed, and Charon shook as he looked up at the female in front of him briefly. She didn't seem very phased by the noises, which put Charon's mind at ease a little. She did not seem very old either, as far as he could tell, and she reminded him a little of Gunnar, which further pacified Charon. He was still a little scared to be out here alone, and didn't know if he could trust the young female, but he didn't have much of a choice for now.

Charon was surprised to hear her say that he looked like her brother. He looked at her studiously for a moment, pressing his ears forward and then letting them fall against his skull again. He thought that maybe if he looked like her brother, she might look like any of his siblings, but she didn't at all. "You don't look like m'sister," he mumbled, still a little shook, as he looked away again. She then asked him about being a Warden. Charon had heard about Warden duties, and he did aspire for it, childishly hoping to someday be able to stop more tragedies from happening; as if becoming a Warden would protect Levi somehow.

Instead of sharing all of that, Charon awkwardly said, "Dunno, maybe when I grow up." He held silent for a moment while he considered her question before hesitantly shooting back a question. "Are you a Warden?" he asked inquisitively, his voice betraying his everlasting curiosity. If she was, then maybe he could learn the first steps towards being a good Warden from her. Or maybe she'd tell him more about her brother.

"No, I don't suppose I do," Saena acknowledged. She didn't know what his sister might look like, but judging from him, she imagined freckles. Saena had no freckles, only the half-moon marks below her eyes and her red ears and tail. "I've never met another wolf like me," she elaborated, "but for you to look like my brother but have no relation, that's pretty amazing."

She left it at that. She didn't want to give the pup any ideas that they might be related—she was positive her mother had had only one litter—nor did she want to make him feel devalued by his similarity to Pura. They weren't identical after all, and even if they were, the boy beside her was definitely not like her brother in personality. Where Pura was almost robotic and responded to things because he had to rather than because he felt them, Charon seemed like a wolf who might feel things more.

"I'm not a Warden," she said with a grin, "too small to beat up trespassers by myself. I'm a Naturalist. I watch the weather, read the stars, that sorta thing." She smiled down at Charon, who must have been just reaching his rapid growth stage, for he wasn't really that much shorter than her at all, and she suspected he would be much larger in the end. "I came here 'cause I dreamt about the ocean tide, and wanted to see it for myself. It moved a lot faster in my dream, though."

Charon was intrigued that apparently, her brother looked just like him. He thought about it further, but decided against asking more about it, because he got distracted by her answer to his question about the Warden thing.

It hadn't really occurred to Charon that you needed to be big to be a Warden, so he looked genuinely surprised when the female told him about it. He sort of liked the idea of beating up trespassers at the borders (maybe because it made him feel more secure about keeping Levi at his side and under control so that he couldn't go away like the rest of his family), but was distracted from the whole Warden ordeal when she mentioned being a Naturalist.

"There's a trade that watches weather??" asked Charon, looking flabbergasted. "The stars can be read??" he hastily added, as though he'd changed his mind and wanted to hear the answer to the star-question first. They already fascinated him, after all, and he liked to think that his lost family was up there, watching him from above.

When she told him about her dream of the ocean tide, Charon's eyes widened. "You mean you dreamt of it b'fore ever seeing it for real?" He paused a short moment to let the gravity of it all sink in before he blurted out, "That's so cool!"

"Yup!" said Saena brightly, angling her head so she could peer at the sky. "I'm still learning to read them, but they form figures that tell stories. If you learn the stories, you can know about history." The simorgh in her dreams had yet to tell her anything about the stars, though. Whatever divine knowledge was hidden in them was not for her ears yet. She had to earn it, only then would the spiritual blessing of her birth—Atka's blessing, not that she knew any of that—reveal the truths to her.

"Right now, all I can do is predict the weather and that sorta thing." She smiled sheepishly, in case she'd disappointed the boy. "But yeah, I dreamt about the ocean before I ever saw it. It's pretty weird but I dream like that a lot. Call it a Naturalist's instincts."

Swishing her tail, Saena glanced at the seals once more. The large male had practically swallowed the female with his girth in some violent dance, and she looked away quickly. "Do you have cool dreams like that sometimes? Where you learn stuff you don't learn anywhere else?"

Charon printed in his mind that the stars formed stories and that those stories could be read. It was a bit of a disappointment that Saena did not know about the stories and could not tell him anything about them specifically, but he told himself that he would do his very best to learn them. Maybe some day he would meet someone who could teach him more, or maybe he would just learn on his own some day.

When Saena said that she could predict the weather, Charon's eyes widened in amazement. He'd never heard of such a rare trait and it sounded thoroughly awesome. "Really?? That's sooo cool!" he squeaked, his voice catching in his throat as he tried to hide his excitement. "Can you teach me to predict weather, too?" he asked, his voice hopeful as he looked at Saena in amazement. He had completely forgotten any fears he had previously had about the seals, and didn't notice Saena's attention for them because he was so enveloped in her stories.

"Did the dream tell you something you need to do here, or just to go here?" asked Charon. It wasn't often that he was interested in what anyone else did or said, but Saena was an above averagely interesting individual.

The thought that someone would dream about something before ever seeing it themselves was very exciting to Charon. He wished he had ever had such dreams, but sadly, he never did. When Saena asked him if he did, he almost felt a little boring (something that Charon normally never did, because even if nothing interesting happened to him, he always knew how to come up with a story that sounded like he lead a very interesting life). It took him a moment to come up with a reply, but eventually Charon said, "This one time I dreamt about the stars, and then I woke up and when I left the den and looked at the stars it was almost like they were trying to tell me their stories or something." It was only half-true, because he hadn't really had that dream, but he had waken up one day in the middle of the night and just felt drawn in by the stars. "I think that my ma is with the stars, too. They must be good friends." They had to be, if they would take in his mother after she had died, to give her a new home.

Charon hesitantly added after a moment of pause, "Maybe I still need to learn how to do it." It wasn't often that Charon would admit to having flaws, but in this case he thought that maybe if he admitted to not having had these dreams often, that maybe Saena would teach him more about the dreams.

Charon seemed excited at the prospect of telling the weather, which in turn made Saena excited. When she was his age, she would've scoffed at the mention of watching the sky—how boring, she might've said—but now that she was older, she saw the value in it. It helped her Gamekeeping immensely to know when it might rain and when the deer and elk might go into hiding from an incoming storm. Of course, she had yet to accurately predict a storm, probably because they rarely happened in the winter.

"Well," she said, turning her head up to the sky and observing the clouds. It was a thin layer of high-flying cirrostratus, translucent and sheet-like. "I find it easiest to tell based on the clouds. Like those clouds," she pointed out, gesturing that Charon should look at them too, "mean humidity. It'll probably drizzle or lightly snow tomorrow if they hang around for the rest of the day." She wasn't always good at Naturalism, though. It was very possible that these clouds would be the exception to her usual predictions—they happened more than she would like to admit.

When Charon went on about his dream and then mentioned his mother, Saena felt her heart plummet a little. "I bet your mom wanted to tell you the stories, and that's why she called you outside to look at them in your dream, but maybe she just couldn't say them loud enough. I'm sure you'll know them, soon, maybe even sooner than I will!" she said, though who could truly know what someone's dream meant? Saena knew her "prophetic" dreams from her normal ones by the presence of the simorgh; maybe stars were the sign that Charon was having a "prophetic" dream, too. "My mom's with the stars, too," she said, although she didn't really believe that wolves went to the stars when they died.

As Saena pointed at the clouds in the sky, Charon lifted his head to look. He bobbed his head in recognition and tried to remember what the clouds looked like so that he would be able to tell when it was raining again some other time. He wondered if anyone in Stavanger Bay knew how to watch the clouds' shapes for weather. But maybe he would be able to learn just by looking at them and then seeing what the weather did. "Cool!" said Charon, and he made a point out of watching the clouds more often. Predicting the weather was pretty much like predicting the future to Charon, and who didn't want to be psychic?

Saena tried to explain Charon's non-existant dream, and he nodded, pretty much having forgotten that he'd made it up at this point. It did sound like a really nice dream to have, for his mother to tell him to go see the stars so that she could whisper the stories to him. "I'm gonna listen extra good next time I'm watching the stars," Charon promised, though mostly to himself. He hoped that he would be able to hear their stories then.

As Saena said that her mother was with the stars, too, Charon looked saddened. "Oh," he said at first, not sure how was proper to respond. "Did she get attacked by a bear too?" He wasn't sure what those odds were, or if it was okay to ask someone how their parent died at all, but he wasn't really sure what else to say.

Charon's conclusion was that Saena's mom was killed by a bear. What? Saena didn't hear much in her life about wolves being attacked or killed by bears, but that must be what happened to Charon's mother, or else he wouldn't ask. The very thought of her own mother being slaughtered by one of the largest predators in the area was enough to make her shiver lightly. "No, not a bear," she said slowly as her heart went out to the young freckled boy.

"My mom died giving birth," she explained, fully expecting that Charon would know something about giving birth. She was a teenager after all, and there were no other children at the Plateau from which to draw an idea of their knowledge. "I never met her. Did you get to meet your mom at least?"

If Saena had met Pied, perhaps they would've been best friends. Perhaps she wouldn't have grown into the female she was, but a gentler version of herself, more concerned with good times than with respect. Or maybe she would've turned out the same way, and Pied would've been disappointed in her, or maybe proud of her. There was no way to tell, and she didn't want to think about it much more than that.

Saena's mother had died another way, Charon soon found out. It seemed really sad that she had died when giving birth, since that meant that Saena had never even got to meet her. Even though he had been really young when his mother had died, Charon still remembered aproximately how she looked (well, mostly that she was white), and how she smelled (he was pretty sure he knew, anyway, but since he'd never smell her again it was hard to tell whether it was real or just a fictional mental scent to make him feel better when he missed his mother).

"Yeah," Charon said and he nodded. He suddenly felt really sad, and looked away at the ocean for a short moment. "I — I gotta go," he said, and he looked at Saena with sad eyes. "Thanks for all the learning stuff. Where are you from? Can I visit sometimes to learn more, when I'm more bigger?" Charon tried to hold his emotion back, because he didn't want to look like a baby (even though he still was) by bringing out the sob stories about how he missed his mother. It was silly, anyway, because he'd only known her for really short before she died... But he still missed her, and talking about dead mothers reminded the boy of the empty spaces in the den where his parents should've been.

If she felt guilty about upsetting Charon, it didn't show. The truth was that Saena had no idea she'd made him feel differently than he had moments prior. It was good that she chose a trade other than Counselor to pursue, for after all the events that made her jaded, she found it difficult to relate to others. She found it difficult to even recognize their pain, at times.

"From Blacktail Deer Plateau," she said smilingly, still unaware despite the waver in his throat and the sudden dismissal that Charon was upset about anything. "Just past the forest here, you can't miss it. I don't see a problem with you coming to visit. I'll always be there." Maybe that wouldn't be true after all, but Saena intended to stay for quite some time. There was nothing about the Plateau to drive her away.

"Remember to keep an eye on the clouds!" she said before standing, shaking her pelt, and taking his cue to part ways. She had to head back anyway, before the sun got too low and navigating Ravensblood Forest became difficult.

Blacktail Deer Plateau. Charon nodded and said, "I'll visit you," wanting to learn more about her dreams and the weather-telling. He mentally noted himself that he would watch the clouds and try to observe them as best he could, to make sure he'd learn about predicting weather. Surely if he would watch clouds, and then weather would follow, he could therefore link the weather and the cloud patterns. He'd try, anyway, though it would prove a trying task for a young boy with a tiny attention span.

"Bye!" Charon called out to Saena as he turned around and started to trot away, in the general direction of Stavanger Bay. He soon started to run, feeling emotional and vulnerable, and didn't stop running until he finally reached the Bay, where he felt a little more safe and loved, and further contemplated how he wished his mother was here in solitude.