Stavanger Bay let me redefine god into something i can become

For @Szymon. Tag for visibility (if this wouldn't be the case, PM me and I'll change it). Anyone else is also welcome!

Qilaq’s routine hadn’t changed much. She’d wake and eat and romp around a little, then sleep for a while and repeat it all over again, and then one day she wakes up and finds she’s nothing but long, lanky legs. She suddenly finds it difficult to walk more than a few feet without tripping over her own, finding herself in the sandy dirt more times than not. With the new set of legs she’s concerning herself over, her other worries are often left to the wayside. Her parents hadn’t come for her, nor had Amayo taken her to them, and she’d stopped questioning it—whether she had forgotten or accepted it is left uncertain—and continues on her business trying to untangle her limbs.

Without knowing @Doe isn’t far from her, Qilaq hits the ground for the third time that morning. Sandy and dirt cover her wet nose and fill her mouth. She bites her tongue in the process and the metallic taste of blood surprises her. The girl lays there for a moment, staring down the length of her nose to the mess of dirt in front of her, before eventually picking herself up and trying to spit out the mess she’s acquired to not mind anymore.

It was Szymon’s turn to mind Qilaq. He had become well accustomed to her cyclical routine of eating, playing, and sleeping — but the behavior she now exhibited was new to him. She was not made of the same stuff that composed the scrappy little witch doctor — her limbs did not spring with flighty exuberance or dance with gazelle-like grace — but she had never been quite this clumsy before. Every few feet, her gangy legs seemed to tangle and drop her heavily into the sand; he watched dumbly, his knowledge of medicine too rudimentary to sort out the Rubik’s Cube that, once solved, would lend some clue of her acute malady. The metallic tang of blood sprang to his nostrils as she tumbled to the earth this time, biting her tongue.

“Q-Q-Qilaq,” he intoned quietly, wondering whether she would hear him. Approaching her slowly, he nosed lightly at her shoulder as she rose unsteadily, but with great deliberation, to her feet. “Come with me,” he murmured, feeling uneasy about commanding her after Sharkbait had seemed so reluctant to accept his company. He took a step toward the freshwater source near the cliff formed by Donnelaith’s wooded territory, gesturing with a quirk of his scarred muzzle that she was meant to follow him. He only hoped that if he walked tight beside her, she would not fall again. His steps were slow and measured as he turned to regard her.

Try as she may, she isn't able to get all the dirt from her mouth. Her tongue and tip of her nose remains coated in debris and one lip tinged with blood. She lifts one legs to paw at the side of her muzzle but does little and she huffs quietly to herself to give in until the dirt eventually works its way out of her mouth. Qilaq smacks her lips a few times as she adjusts to the taste of her own blood lining her tongue.

The nudge of her shoulder causes her to over exaggerate a step to the side as she swings her head back up to see Szymon next to her. She beams a smile up at him as if nothing is wrong despite the obvious blood on her dark muzzle. He moved a few steps forward and without needing much invitation, she tries to follow his steps. If he picks up his right front paw, so does she, but she struggles to keep up with his long legs. Eventually, she gets tangled up again and tumbles to the ground but without any injury and she's bouncing back to her feet to continue the mimicry.

Whatever the girl was afflicted with, it was not a lack of spirit. She beamed a bloody smile at him, her eyes bright and untroubled, and willingly she followed him — but in trying to mimic him, she attempted to match their impossibly uneven strides. He would have to approach this in a different manner, and wrestled with the problem in his mind for a time — pausing as she tumbled to the ground again and bounced back up to try again. “Q-Qilaq,” he said again, not altogether sure what to make of the small sea urchin. Sometimes he wondered whether her hearing was impaired — but volume didn’t seem to make a difference. He had seen the girl respond to the faintest of auditory stimuli with his own eyes, so he discarded that idea. His next theory was disrespect, but that was immediately thrown out the window before it had a chance to take root. She was quiet and soft, wholly theirs.

Crouching to the ground and crawling seemed a bad plan — likely she would do the same with her smaller body, and they would go even more slowly. Szymon decided that the best plan was to adjust his own stride to match her smaller one, and although this meant taking tiny steps and looking a bit silly, he gently repeated his gesture from earlier: a brush of his nose toward her shoulder and a quirk of his muzzle in the direction he wished them to go. This time, he took slower, smaller steps that were more appropriately Qilaq-sized, making his gait a bit clumsy but hopefully making things easier on the girl. “Y-You are doing well, he ventured, trying to encourage her. “You are a g-g-good cub, Q-Qilaq.”

Her attention is broken when he touches her shoulder again, her gait slowing to a stop as she looks back to her shoulder where he’d bumped his nose. Her brow burrows to see why he’d done it a second time. She sniffs whatever part of her she can touch nearest to the spot, worried something might be wrong or on her that she hadn’t noticed. Nothing seems out of the ordinary though and eventually she realizes he’s walking again, this time with shorter steps that make him look a little funny.

A chortle sort of laugh escapes her but it only lasts for a few seconds as her paws set forward, trying to do the same thing. She shortens her steps, more than is natural to walk normally, and shuffles her legs as she kicks up sand everywhere. She giggles then at the reaction, distracted from mimicking his steps and instead begins shoving the sand forward in every which way to see just how far she can send them.

I apologize for the neverending stream of lackluster posts, and for the colossal wait. ♥

The burbling bubble of laughter that spills from Qilaq’s muzzle causes Szymon’s narrow skull to swing around sharply in surprise; he hasn’t heard her laugh as a result of him before, and the result is a strangely ticklish feeling that swims uneasily in his gut. It’s not the same feeling of dread and miasma that occurs when Qilaq is fretful — it’s vaguely pleasurable, if a bit discomfiting. The corners of his scarred lips quirk into a roguish grin as she, too, shortens her steps and begins to kick up sand; and when her gangly legs start propelling sand in every direction simply because they can, Szymon laughs along with her. “Silly cub,” he comments mildly, loose and easy enough that he can keep the stutter at bay. “Is that fun?”

It’s in the back of his mind that he needs to teach Qilaq to swim — the Drop is in her eminent future — but his first intention is to take her to freshwater so she can clean the blood from her mouth. For the moment, though, he hesitates only briefly — and then with a solemn expression that is incongruous with his motions, he begins to mirror the girl as she mirrored him only moments before. Long legs, notched with scars and fresher scabs, kick sand out in waves; he’s careful to avoid Qilaq so that he doesn’t incite Doe’s wrath by blinding their only daughter, but he can’t see the enchantment. His childhood, peppered with stress-induced seizures, beatings, and abuse, hasn’t prepared him for fatherhood — he knows only what Qilaq shows him.

Soon, there is more sand. Sand that battles against her own and clash in thrown waves, colliding to make a flurry the peppers her coat with imperfections. None of it bothers her too much aside from an occasional irritated flick of her ear but, for the most part, she's content in the silent battle.

Eventually the kicking dulls and she slows to a stop, halting all flying debris and any motion forward. Her head tilts one way, pointing toward the taller wolf, and smiles a toothy grin. A few of her incisors are missing and one adult one has grown in, leaving her a little quirky from those that peer too close.

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Szymon is relieved when the sand battle comes to an anticlimactic end. Playing has a tendency to make him uneasy, even when it is warranted and invited. “Come with Appeh, Qilaq,” he entreats her, angling his muzzle in an attempt to smooth the bridge of his scarred muzzle against her cheek. He begins to move toward the freshwater source at a slightly quicker pace, loping a pace or two forward and then pausing to wait for the grey-eyed girl to catch up. He ought to feel a sense of urgency, but interacting with the girl is a lesson in itself and he finds himself as eager to understand her as he is to teach her. He is determined in a feverish, insistent way that she will not know the torment that comprised his own childhood. When he is close enough to the waterfall, he bends his head to drink — and to clear the sand from his own mouth. “Wash your face,” he suggests, “like this.” He bends his head again, dipping his muzzle below surface and giving his narrow skull a brief shake that looses the sand from his scarred lips and leathery nares.

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She follows alongside him with ease and she tries to keep up when he puts distance between them, making it to the shore of the water before she does. Her head cranes upwards to search his expression but he dips his nose into the water farther than she ever has. Ears droop upon her head and her brows knit together, stepping forward as she’s encouraged to do the same. He demonstrates to her again and she stares down at the water and her wavy reflection meeting her glare.

Qilaq dunks her nose into the water and attempts the same motions, but she’s falling back and gasping for air the next second. The burn runs up the length of her nose and into the back of her throat as she tries to spit out the water inhaled in such a short span of time. She rapidly shakes her head and coughs, surprised by the sudden attack into her nostrils.

Rusty. Getting back in the swing of things! Posts may be clunky for awhile. ;-;

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It is with ample concern that Szymon regards his gray-eyed daughter, one ear swaying uncertainly to the side as she sputters and coughs, somehow managing to inhale a noseful of water. Soothingly he steps forward, preening the fur at her nape with gentle firmness. He wonders how to explain to her that she should not breathe while the tip of her muzzle is below surface, and decides that now is as good a time as any to start teaching her the basics of swimming. Freshwater is more forgiving than salt, in any case. He wades into the freshwater pool, remaining in the shallows that lap at his notched legs, and invites Qilaq to do the same: “Come here, littling,” he says, having integrated some of Doe’s terms of endearment into his own vocabulary. “You — you are mine now, mine and Doe’s,” he informs her solemnly, “so you must learn to swim.” His wording is a little shoddy, but the youngest Cairn was never one for eloquence. Oh, he has his moments — but this is not one of them. “We are the Sea’s chosen wolves, so you must learn to travel through Her kingdom with ease.” He gestures to the water in front of him. “Face me, and come into the water, Qilaq.”

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There's no amount of rust that would label your posts anything but beautiful.

Appeh doesn’t say anything else and so she doesn’t suspect she’ll have to do that again, whether or not she knows how. Instead, her attention drifts for a moment to watch the wipes in the water. The water around her paws is thick with mud and she wrinkles her nose, looking up at the other once she’s spoken to again. She stares at him for a moment, as if she doesn’t comprehend what he wants her to do, and her gaze drops to the water. It takes a few seconds but she moves, anchoring herself where she’s needed, the water soaking the more and more of her fur.

♥

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Szymon’s golden eyes watch Qilaq carefully as she works out what he is asking of her, and when her soft gray eyes move from his face to the water that separates them, his ginger-laced tail whisks approval. Commands and concepts seem to slip easily from Qilaq’s grasp, and Szymon is never entirely sure if he’s going about things the right way; she is only his second experience with puppies of any kind, and he has every reason to suspect that they are all like Qilaq and Sharkbait. What he appreciates about the darkling child is her willingness to listen, whether or not she retains everything she hears. Szymon’s stern features break into a triumphant smile as his girl wades further and further into the pool. Swimming comes naturally to the Cairn brood, but his swiftly growing daughter does not possess his seafaring blood. Stretching forward, he aims to brush the tip of his nose against the bridge of Qilaq’s muzzle. “For now,” he says, recalling her previous coughing and sputtering, “keep your head above water.” He backs away another step, but keeps his nose in place for another moment before drawing back. The water should still be shallow enough that she will not go under; he simply wants her to grow accustomed to the weightlessness of it.

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Qilaq wrinkles her nose once he touches her and her tail waves back and forth, lightly splashing the water as she works her way in. Each step is slow and she focuses her gaze on Appeh, finding the wet ground beneath her as the water level rises, soaking more and more of her fur. In order to keep her head above water, her head is exaggeratingly elevated so that her nose doesn’t even touch the surface. The stinging from before still remains phantom in her muzzle, reminding her of the displeasure, but the she explores her trust in her father as he guides her further into the pool.

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Szymon angles his body, his golden eyes fixed patiently and warmly on Qilaq’s gray ones; he wants her to experience the buoyancy of water, but she is yet unblessed — automatically he aligns his body parallel with the muddy embankment. Even if he treads deeper, as long as Qilaq remains in front of him she should be able to keep her head above water. “Good girl,” he praises her warmly, taking another slow step back, keeping their noses within touching reach should she wish to reach out to him. Making sure to move at Qilaq’s pace instead of his own, he continues a languid rhythm — step, pause, acclimate; step, pause, acclimate — designed to build the girl’s confidence. In time, he hopes to have Qilaq submerged up to her shoulders, but he has no wish to rush things and frighten her. The Drop will happen whether the foundling is ready or not — Szymon merely wishes to give her a fighting chance.

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Qilaq is quiet the more she moves, eyes angle up at Appeh but she focuses on how the water makes her body feel. It’s cool as it laps against her legs and then the base of her chest. Soon, there’s a weightlessness feeling to it and if Szymon wasn’t in front of her, she might have lunged forward for more. The girl takes a long step that puts her out further than she meant to but she catches herself enough to keep herself up right and the water barely touches her chin before she’s back up and refocusing on what her legs are doing. She feels heavier now that more fur is wet than under water and she leans forward to try and even it out. She mumbles something as her gaze drops to the wave water between them as she suddenly attempts to close the distance.

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For the rest of the afternoon, Szymon works with Qilaq in the water — little by little, he encourages her to explore the pool on her own. Once she grows accustomed to the sensation of weightlessness and learns to navigate through it, he brings her back home to Doe.

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