Shy Deer Steppes Spirits in my head and they won't go

There's still a very long way to go, but the slim woman recognizes her present surroundings. On the way out of the wilderness, Gracious and she passed over these sands, laden with pronghorns and all strange manners of reptile. June recognizes it immediately for the prickly bushes that dot the landscape and feels relief flood her narrow chest. She'd spent nights on the road worrying whether she would ever make it home, but now that she knows she's in the right area, June can let go of some of her tension.

She pads slowly across the barren steppes, pausing momentarily to observe a lone pronghorn in the distance before continuing on. She narrowly dodges an encounter with a snake coiled beneath a bush, and is just eyeing a vulture high in the sky when a splash catches her attention and she glances down to find her paw in an inch deep puddle of water.

June didn't realize how thirsty she is until spotting the pool, and she stoops to drink deeply of it, attempting to ignore the sandy taste and grit and briefly letting her attentiveness wane.

Predates June's thread in Silvertip Mountain.

There wasn't much in the steppe. Potema knew that, but that didn't stop her from passing through the inhospitable sandy stretch on her way into the Haunted Wood. Plants grew in strange places, she knew that. Perhaps she would find a clump or two of a strange plant that she could test out for herself. Even snakes would be a useful find — snake skin could be used for binding wounds if prepared correctly.

This place wasn't a true desert — Inigo had told her of the deserts of his youth; the great expanses of red sand that lasted for miles on end, with orange mounds of rock as numerous as the trees here — but that didn't excuse the fact that this place was a dry wasteland. Even passing through here she could feel the moisture from her body leaving her. The white witch licked her lips, hoping to get a drink before she exited the steppe. Her single eye caught the flicker of light that denoted the reflection of the sun on water and she instantly walked towards it. Unfortunately for her she was not the only one who was in search of water in the barren wasteland. Another pale female lapped its murky depths and Potema could see that the rare water source was not going to last long. She stood by the pool's edge and began drinking its gritty water, trying to get as much water in her system as she could, her eye flickering towards the other woman occasionally.

The puddle is not large. Perhaps a couple steps across, at most. For this reason, June is not expecting company when Potema enters her field of view and her personal bubble at the same time. Momentarily stunned by Potema's willingness to get so close for a drink when there is surely another puddle somewhere else, June steps back with a prickle of her hackles, but the gentle-mannered girl is not aggressive, only cautious. That caution only grows in leaps and bounds when her eyes catch on Potema's scars, her fogged eye, and the gruesome red something-or-other smeared inelegantly on her face.

Mild-mannered as she is, June isn't one for openly speaking with anyone, let alone someone who looks a bit like a nut. But Potema's abrupt arrival and willingness to draw so near to an unfamiliar wolf interests June for just a moment. She takes several steps to the side, eyeing Potema carefully as she puts some much needed distance between them, before finally murmuring, "hello," in a quiet and whimsical tone.

Potema made sure that the other pale woman was not on her blind side and watched through the corner of her seeing eye as the girl shied away from her. Potema kept drinking, sucking up the water greedily, unaware of the other sources of water that must be hidden nearby — this was the one she saw and she was taking it. Feeling her stomach fill up with water the white witch backed away, her chin dripping with water. She ignored the girl's timid greeting, licking her chin as the precious fluid fled her body in large drops of water. She didn't answer until she thought she had sufficiently cleaned her chin, speaking briefly and bluntly. Hey.

June is ignored, but only blinks owlishly in response. It isn't that the girl is used to being ignored, but she knows on the surface she isn't quite the same as other wolves. She gets looks sometimes. Never from her family, though, who know who she is at her core. Deep inside she is a different wolf entirely, a calm and collected and intelligent force of Humility, but on the outside she's only June, and only June is childish and a little slow. She is therefore not offended by Potema's lack of regard, as a child is often unoffended by anything, and readies herself to leave when at last the silver-and-white wolf utters a short, hey.

For a long moment, June stands in silence, maintaining a hawk's eye on the unusual she-wolf. She is quietly gathering her thoughts with slow sweeps of her mind, and it takes her a little longer than your average wolf to achieve, but eventually she opens her mouth and very quietly asks, "why do you look like that?" It's an innocent question, stated politely, as if June doesn't realize how rude it is to ask others why they look the way they do. It's presented as a 6 month old might present such a question, with a lack of hostility or judgment or assumption, in spite of the words themselves.

Potema, after answering the girl half-heartedly, continued to groom herself, taking what was left of the water on her body before it evaporated. But on second thought, wouldn't leaving the water on her make her cool faster? She thought about it for a while, considering the uses of drenching oneself in water during especially hot summers, but her musings were interrupted by the girl's rude yet not rude inquiry.

The one-eyed female glared at the other pale wolf. The girl was nearly a year old, she thought, and yet she spoke and acted much younger. Kendra acted older than this girl! A myriad of possibilities ran through her mind — snarks, quips, snarls, emotionless deadpans... What an asinine question. Potema finally sneered, her lip curling slightly. And not to mention intrusive. I should ask you the same thing. Why do you look so pathetic and twitchy like a rabbit? That summed her up nicely. Never had she seen a more rabbit-like canine. I look the way I do because it is who I am. Does that make sense to you, bunny-girl?

June doesn't know what "asinine" means—her sentence structure is complete now, but she's still worlds behind on her advanced vocabulary—but coupled with a sneer, it comes across hostilely and she shrinks back slightly. Her ears snatch at her scalp when Potema calls her a rabbit, but while a little startled at the response, she is unoffended. She is, however, very much confused by the accusation. June is many things that other wolves are not, and she is a little timid and supposes that's somewhat rabbit-ish, but as for twitchy, well, she doesn't know where that one's coming from at all. She doesn't twitch.

"I'm not a rabbit," she corrects Potema, again in that polite, quiet, lilting tone that suggests she isn't bothered by the other wolf's attitude. Potema isn't making a very nice first impression, but June thinks she must have her reasons for it. Her head tilts slightly to the left to betray her continued confusion about being named a rabbit, but she doesn't attempt to spur the conversation onward. It isn't that she's put off by Potema, because she isn't—her child-like innocence and naivety give her the ability to shrug off some of the meanest comments, depending on who they came from—but she has yet to grow out of awkwardly allowing a conversation to hang rather than carrying it.

Potema was silently disappointed that the female didn't respond as she thought she would: with revulsion or sadness. At heart the white witch was a bully, and she had thought that the girl was an easy target. Alas, she would be harder to mess with than she thought. Naiveté sometimes worked as a shield towards Potema's insults. The girl had taken her literally after all. Truly? I never would have guessed. Potema sneered, annoyed by the girl's confused but not offended expression. I suppose you're wandering through here, aren't you rabbit? She turned the conversation away from her insults, intent on wondering why a small girl like herself was walking through these steppes alone. She made it her business to know.

Again Potema responds with a sneer, and again June believes that Potema is mistaken. Her head tilts further, one ear drifting toward the ground, and her eyes are puzzled. But if Potema cannot tell a rabbit from a wolf, it isn't June's place to tell her the difference. Hers is to humbly accept that the other yearling might perceive the world in a different way, and so she drops the matter entirely. It's better than judgment in her eyes.

Instead, she tells herself that Potema is calling her a rabbit for lack of anything else to call her, and she responds with a smile and a quiet introduce of, "my name's June." A sharp intake of breath follows this, but Humility has not uttered her true name and is still coming to terms with the fact that her true name and her given name are not the same. You have nothing to fear, she reminds herself. Your given name is safe to use.

"I'm going home," she indicates, believing this to be somewhat different than just wandering through, although in what way she can't explain. "You are a wanderer?"

The puzzlement on June's face killed Potema's fun. She snorted, then composed herself and regained what little civilty she had within her. She could be nice to a younger stranger for once in her life, right? Ha no. Potema, She responded. She had thought to use her second name, Vaermina, but thought against it in the end. What purpose would it serve? She had nothing to truly hide from the young girl, unable to think of her as a threat. In this way she was similar to the other pale female, but she wouldn't know the small link between them.

In a way, She was being vague, but it was true. She loved wandering much more than she did being cooped up in one place. Though she loved her birthplace, it grew dull after a while. Where is your home?

In a way, says Potema, and this clashes with June's child-like view of things enough for her to ask, "in which way?" Her mind can only wrap around the concept of travel as something you're doing or something you're not. The existence of in-betweens still eludes her when it comes to these trickier, more abstract ideas. She's still chewing on the idea in her head when Potema asks about her home, so for a long moment, June doesn't answer, only to realize she's being addressed directly.

"Oh!" she sighs airly. "My home is Silvertip Mountain." Everyone knows of Silvertip Mountain as far as June knows, but just in case, she says, "it's the one all by itself," as though there is only one lone mountain in the entire world.

I wander away from home for long periods of time, but I always come back. This recent trip to Hag Fen was no different — she was back now, wasn't she? The other pale female paused, and Potema felt annoyance build its way into her heart. When the girl finally realized who she was addressing, Potema huffed softly, releasing her frustration within and listening to the girl. She was aware of Silvertip Mountain, though she knew little about the pack that inhabited it. Potema nodded. I know of it.

I know of it, confirms Potema, and June bobs her head in agreement. Surely everyone must know of Silvertip Mountain and the pack that lived there? They'd been there all of June's life, which felt like an eternity, so of course it made sense that others knew of it. But June lets the thought drift away, focusing instead on Potema's life of wandering, or how it sounds to the brown-eared yearling.

"Isn't it lonesome?" she wonders aloud. While she has a desire to explore and become a scout, she worries that life on the road must be dreadfully lonely. Potema must know, thinks June, and so she eagerly awaits an answer with the hopes of applying it to her own experience in the future, if that is even possible.

But as it turns out, Potema is not a creature easily taken by loneliness as June is, and they part ways soon after discovering they have very little in common.