Overture Downs You should go and love yourself*

Saena has never been here before, but she identifies with the plain in a way, as if it's somehow familiar. Likely she is remembering a territory she's passed through before, but now that she thinks of it, it was different—dotted with bushes rather than these low-branched trees. Her walk is slow and relaxed but unhalting as she scouts the land south of Jade Fern Grove. Phoenix Maplewood isn't near enough for this place to mean anything to her, but curiosity was what led her to become an outrider and it still holds the reins of that particular trade. She glances over her shoulder at the grove behind her, but her memory of running into Morran there sends a shudder up her spine and forces her to keep going forward rather than doubling back.

The wind is high and cold, enough to make her nose feel frigid. Her plush coat protects her for the most part though her paws are growing cold as well. Soon, Saena will need to rest. Until then, she plans to explore every inch of the meadow, commit it to memory as best she can. If the herds chose to move out of the north when the snows came, this might be as good a place as any to search for them and knowing something of the land would certainly help any attempt she made to bring down prey here.

@Luke

Present tense challenge.

The cat's attack on his alpha disturbs the blue-nosed wolf. He feels that he has failed as a beta, to not have picked up on the presence of the threat, and to have not been within range to assist his leader when he needed it most. Mordecai could have lose his life; but for some inexplicable reason, he had lost only an eye and a bit of flesh and fur. Perhaps some of his confidence. It bothers Luke to think the cat had meant to send a message, that the incident was not to be isolated. He worries for his pack.

He focuses on patrols. He scours the surrounding territories for evidence that the cat was still around, but for now finds none. Instead, as he lifts his nose to pick scents from the wind, he catches a familiar one. It warms his heart, though it remains heavy in the wake of the incident. Fondness lends speed to his paws as he searches for Saena, alerting her with a woof from afar as soon as his silver eyes finds her.

Without hesitance, nor even a flicker of thought about the last time they had met, he lopes over and reaches forward to greet her affectionately with a nuzzle, his snout seeking the soft furs of her cheek.

That was a challenge actually, quite different! Lol

In the distance, the grove extends a finger of land. Saena is on a course to enter it but, abruptly remembering the disturbing encounter from last time, she angles herself more to the south in an effort to avoid it. In so doing, she catches sight of a figure in the distance, possibly preoccupied as it appears to have its head down. She squints in an attempt to gather more information from a distance but there's nothing much to tell from here. The light of the sun obscures the figure's pelt colour and the species is anyone's guess.

But then it's growing larger by the efforts of both parties—Saena moving toward it, and it toward her, and soon enough she can tell that it is indeed a wolf. A wolf with white fur. She's barely managed to make this detail out when the wolf begins to run at her. The alpha female hunches into a defensive stance, readying herself for an attack as the white-furred wolf, a male, closes the gap.

She has only one second to see his nose is blue before he's pressed right up against her. Something in her chest unexpectedly hitches but then she's laughing and squeaks, "Luke!" while unabashedly pressing closer. Their last encounter ended up with a jealous Reek on scene, but Reek is nowhere to be found this time and she relishes the affection of her close friend.

She receives him well, permitting his affection and pressing back. He is absorbed in the closeness, and his nose travels from her cheek to the thicker furs on her neck. He buries his face there with a soft whine. He was unaware of how desperately he craved touch and nearness until now, and he cannot help but nibble at her delicate skin and preen the bits of debris from her fur. She can perhaps sense the neediness in his touch, and his hesitance to step back out of contact with her. It is a distraction, it is a comfort, and so long as she allows him, he holds close to the warmth of her.

"I'm happy to see you," he murmurs, and though there is sincere and undeniable fondness in his tone, there is an underlay of hurt and disappointment in himself. It speaks to his inexperience with the trials and challenges of life, and to the strength of his heart, that he would take so much blame unto himself for happenstance. He is not so well-adjusted as he likes to think.

She should perhaps be more withdrawn from Luke, but he's always been a friend with whom she feels no reluctance. Even when he crossed over the fledgling borders of the maplewood, she felt no need to reprimand him. She remembers Reek's reaction to him and almost falters, but senses something has changed about Luke and thinks better of pulling away. Besides, the gentle pull of his teeth through her fur feels nice, and she returns the favour by combing the errant short hairs crowning his head.

His voice breaks her out of this friendly contact, though, and now she pulls just her head back to glance over his features. Something different, but she can't place it. Perhaps a slight pinch to his usual carefree expression, or perhaps something in the depths of his eyes, makes her ask him, "what's wrong?" He's never been one for emotional pain but it seems evident now, even to one as poor with perception as Saena could be. The exact cause of his tone she cannot decipher, but she knows there's something off. The worst she ever saw him was when he collapsed on her in the maplewood and expressed his worry, and this seems somehow worse. Quieter, but more deadly.

His idle grooming continues. He is content to do so for as long as she will let him. She reciprocates, preening the shorter furs of his crown, which draws a soft, subtle croon from him, perhaps not even loud enough to touch her copper ear. But she pulls back to behold his face, reading the sorrow therein, and inquiring into his problems. He favors her with a small, warm smile, releasing his breath in a quiet sigh before he responds.

"I have become my pack's beta," he says, though this of course is not the news that burdens him. He swallows, his blue tongue poking out to lick at his lower lip. "I failed. Mordecai was attacked by a cougar. I was no where near to help him, he could have been killed. I should have patrolled better, known the cat was around, especially since I am an outrider too." Perhaps it sounds ridiculous to her ear, for his self-blame was irrational in many respects. His silver eyes avert from hers, casting his gaze toward the ground as his brows knot overhead of them.

Saena's tongue presses to the roof of her mouth, ready to utter words of congratulations, but his explanation continues beyond his initial good news. With good always comes bad; this is something Saena has grown to anticipate, and it seems true for Luke as well. She doesn't really know who Mordecai is—their brief time hunting together on the plateau has long since faded from memory—but she's able to guess at his identity. She feels poignantly his grief, remembering her helplessness the night that Redtail Rise burned, but when he casts his eyes to the ground, she drops her snout to nudge his up.

"It's not your fault," she tells him. Albeit naive, she believes this. Even if Luke had been nearby, there was no telling what a cougar would've done to him if he'd gone to its aid. It might've been better for Mordecai to die than for Luke to be injured as well, or so she thinks. Her thoughts naturally favour an outcome that spares her friends. "The cat could've shown up overnight, maybe no one knew it was around. He didn't, either. It's not your responsibility to be everywhere at once. It's not possible." Pausing, she gently licks the side of his face, then asks, "he didn't call for back-up?"

He does not resist the touch of her muzzle beneath his jaw to bring his snout up, and his gaze lifts to meet hers again as he swallows back a lump born of bothersome emotions. He listens to her and hears the reason in her words, but his mind is closed to it. He is an emotional creature, and though he does not realize it so clearly yet, it was his error to attempt to shelter his emotions, his passionate heart, beneath a fragile barrier of nonchalance.

In his effort to become unphased by feeling he has insured his own undoing, insured that once the wall had been breached, emotion would come as a stampede, deafening the voice of logic and crushing his levelheadedness and optimism. He was to become weak and wild with feeling, having never allowed himself the chance to appropriately temper his emotions with reason, to seat them firmly in his breast such that he remain in control of his faculties.

He tilts his face toward her as her tongue caresses him. "If he did, I did not hear him." Nor did anyone else, but it did not matter to him. Fatigued by his own brew of anger and guilt he shifts down her side a half pace, just to lay his head across her shoulders in a semi-embrace. Here he picks up his idle grooming again, his blue tongue smoothing the furs of her back. He needs this contact and wants this closeness, for he has no interest in words, either hearing or speaking.

Excuse the ramble I am working stuff out LMAO.

I did not hear him. Maybe, then, Mordecai failed to call his wolves. Saena wonders idly if it was a suicide attempt, for surely any sane wolf would raise their voice in alarum at the first sighting of an aggressive cougar, but... no, she can't make that assumption. She can't make any assumptions. Mordecai was a pack mate once, but it was brief and her interaction with him was limited to a single hunt prior to her departure from the plateau. The way he conducted himself then suggested a logical creature. She also had no right to guess at the intentions of another, especially one who wasn't within her jurisdiction. Mordecai was no longer a pack mate, and she no longer could afford to wonder about those outside her pack.

Luke, however, would always be exempt from that callousness. He shifted to preen at the hair above her shoulder blades. Saena betrays even herself when she lets a soft sound of pleasure creep up through her lips. She herself moves to allow him better access and for a moment enjoys the feeling of teeth pulling through her fur. Grooming was such an intimate thing among wolves, an activity with the power to bond even strangers, but with him it's also strangely sensual and personal and adds a bit of heat to the entire act. Thoughts that shouldn't cross her mind, but did fleetingly.

Perhaps because she too craves some nearness to offset the stress of leading her pack lately, she doesn't hesitate to turn her head and nip warmly, playfully at the longer tufts near his cheeks, as if coaxing him... but to what end?

Oops! Forgot this one when I was catching up on posts, sorry. Time to confuse my brain some more ehehehehe!

Her soft utterance of pleasure and the nips on his cheek stirs him, and his own teeth descend from her spine to sensually trace the curvature of her ribs and gently bite at her hip bone. There is a brief moment of clarity in his mind, and he pauses his with the flat of his incisors pressed to her flesh, mid-nip. But his consideration of the moment is exceptionally fleeting, and barely touches upon the morality of what he is doing. She is a mated woman, but emotion rules him this day more so than ever, and he is taken by her.

He rubs the side of his muzzle along her flank, savoring her scent and the warmth of her body against his face. He is restrained only by his want and need to extend this closeness, but his hold on his urges is precarious, and already one leg is lifted and quavering. He cannot stop it from raising up to lay across her hindquarters as nature, instincts and emotion propel him toward an intimate embrace.

Her relationship was born of adultery. Though young and naive, Saena is no stranger to cheating, although it had never been on her end.

Although she's aged since she'd unwittingly coerced Reek into having sex with her in spite of his mate, her questionable morals haven't changed much. If anything, Reek's willingness to experience her body despite Wynter was a catalyst for the further twisting of her morals into uncertainty, such that now, she doesn't miss the intimate suggestion of Luke's touch and doesn't protest it. A part of her knows she should turn Luke down, remind him that she has a mate, but then, there's something else in the way of that. She has a mate, but she's also attracted to Luke and, having formulated a mateship out of a hasty need to satisfy a primal itch rather than building it from the ground up, her attachment to Reek, albeit great, isn't quite so great that it overcomes her attraction to the blue-nosed creek wolf.

In this moment, the sensuality of his touches and his nearness, something she'd never really thought of but possibly subconsciously had wanted long before this, wins out over any sort of reason or sense of wrongdoing. She twists herself to return his ministrations with heated nips at the side of his neck and his shoulder as he passes by, and when his leg hooks over her side, she turns her head slightly but doesn't stop him. Rather, she whines gently, encouraging him and momentarily forgetting all about the man waiting for her at home.

Mature Content Warning

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: SEX!

She encourages him, and he does not resist. He had been drawn to her since the first time they met, and that attraction had been built upon each time since. Her nips spur him, her whine implores him. He thinks no more, and shifts himself so that his chest presses against her hindquarters. He pauses only so that his teeth may graze the skin at the base of her tail. Then his other foreleg finds its way to her hip, and he encircles her waist tightly, pulling her back toward him as he thrusts to meet her with a salacious growl. It is not with a slow and tender pace that he takes her.

There was a quiet little alarm going off in the back of Saena's brain as Luke's legs tightened around her waist and he pulled her back, but she found it easy to ignore. The second he connected them she blocked it out entirely, for he came fast and rough and she panted, whined and writhed beneath him. How many times did he bring her to the brink, only to teasingly pull her back and then brusquely shove her to the edge again? Saena lost count and fell to his expert rhythm, but eventually she jumped and was carried away on a rush of sensation that drowned the sound of her own voice crying out from her ears.

He is breathless and satiated when he slides from her back, and not without reluctance. He had lost himself and his worries in her, as he sinks to his haunches beside her, he can not help but quietly draw his gaze along her beauty. He finds he wants to press his tongue to those fine curves again and gently pinch the soft flesh beneath her silken fur. But he is aware that he should not have done so the first time; and yet he can not pull his fond, wanting eyes from her.

Saena breathes heavily in the aftermath of their hasty fling, and only then does a little guilt worm its way into her gut. Yet she pushes it away, reluctant to allow her relationship with Reek to encroach on her time with Luke. Her mate doesn't need to know about this; she knows Luke will never tell. Perhaps he would ache to know he is a secret, but Saena had no qualms with it. She believed he friend would want to keep things between them from her vengeful mate, too. She remembered keenly how Reek had treated her blue-nosed pal the last time they had met.

"I'm going to Redtail Rise," she breathlessly told Luke, as if to assure him that she would not be returning home for their sin to be discovered. "After that, when I return, I will try to find some time to steal away." Would she really? Even Saena wasn't sure. Guilt and desire warred in her. Would she risk harming Reek for more of Luke's ruthless brand of lovemaking? Probably. She had never had perfectly straight morals.

With a wink, the female tucked her snout under his, relishing the contact momentarily before tearing herself away. "Bye, Luke," she breathes, forcing herself to head off for the deep taiga, lest she lose herself and thoughts of her mate in him again.

He wants to draw her to him again, to take her again, and possess her for the length of the evening and another day. But even as she is still breathless, she is preparing to leave. He wants to tell her, no, beg her to wait, but the words are caught on his tongue as she presses her snout beneath his own, and he holds her for that brief moment before she tells him good bye. She whisks herself away before he can bring himself out of his own quiet stupor. "Bye, Saena" he murmurs after her, and he is left staring at her backside as she becomes smaller in the distance.

He is warm, cold, confused, content, discontent, and so many things at once. Overcome, he draws a deep breath and shakes his head. He too, turns then, and makes his way home.