Stavanger Bay here, i killed this for you ♥

Tagging for reference. @Doe, come’n get it! [rings dinner bell]

Eager to appease his mate’s apparently bottomless stomach, Szymon threw his weight against the mountain goat he’d brought down — he had been somewhat crafty about the whole thing, waiting for the nanny to spark up a dominance conflict with another female before inelegantly shouldering the babe off its protective overhang. The fall hadn’t killed the young goat; at five months old, it was nearly halfway to adulthood and sure on its feet. Plus, the fall wasn’t that hard. Like its aunt — or grandmother, or babysitter, or whoever — before it, Szymon had driven it toward the beach to use the sand to his advantage — and perhaps also for his own benefit, he mused as he humped his spine and tug-tug-tugged it another few feet. Thankfully the weather had cooled and he was not beaten down by the press of heat to add to the exertion of dragging his kill along. He could almost enjoy the pull of its dead weight against his hamstrings, shoulders, and back, knowing that his injuries from tussling with Mordecai were completely healed now.

On the way he’d passed the forest of ravens whose borders heavily bore @Arturo’s scent, and he could not say whether the Fearghal’s abandonment of the Blackrock troubled him or not. On a personal level, Szymon had considered the older wolf an ally; though they were not close enough to claim friendship, Szymon had respected the man. He was sorry to lose the coywolf’s strength and wits but his emotional and physical response to Arturo would likely be swayed by whatever @Skellige or @Doe wished of him. The thought of the diplomat was pushed from his mind, replaced with the image of Doe and the gleam in her eyes he hoped to see.

When he reached Chateau Dozzle, he took a moment to catch his breath. With his chest, throat, and face spattered with the blood of his kill, he threw back his head to call for his mate — gently in case she took offense to being summoned. His sonorous voice was soft and low, as soothing as he could make it, and swelled with affection — love? — for her and pride that he could speak so openly to her of such things.

Sleep had not found her. Exhaustion was laced up all in her bones, tethered to her very being, but Doe could not find rest. Maybe it was the raw ache of hunger in her belly, or the untamed urge to stretch her legs. Maybe it was that she missed Furiosa, or that she craved Szymon once again. Doe could not decide, and she didn't understand it - how her body could be so weak and tired and yet, here she could only lie awake.

Szymon's arrival was a welcome break from the monotony. At his soft cajolement, Doe readily emerged from their little sand chamber, which no longer fit the three of them comfortable. No, now it could only fit Doe and her belly and her long, gangly legs that just couldn't stretch out enough to keep her from getting sore overnight. It was with relief and anxious whimpers that Doe wiggled out of the sand den and greeted her patient, loving husband.

"Sy," she whispered, his name like a prayer as it fell from her tongue. She ignored the offering for now, and pressed her forhead to the darling male's. Lilac lids fell down over bright, harrowed eyes, and Doe took a moment to breath in the salty scent of her fisherman. They suited each other so finely, and Doe thought that she sometimes forgot that when they spent time apart. She'd forgotten it when Furiosa had appeared, dominant and pale like a conquering queen. Handsome and sweet and brave like her husband, but domineering as Skellige had been when they'd first met on that shore.

"Our brother is far from us, love," she said in a hushed voice, so that their conversation might not travel to strange ears. Their breath mingled together in the chill, damp breeze that came off the Autumn's sea. "I miss him. His leadership - "

The woman could go no further, and though they were just two lost subordinates in the great sea of life, Doe clung to her mate as silent, helpless sobs wracked her body.

Blurp. This post is very short. I am getting tired. X3

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Szymon had comforted Doe through moments of uncertainty before, but this soft, anxious creature whose long, slender legs accentuated the exaggerated roundness of her abdomen was wholly new to him. His golden eyes widened with surprise as she ignored his offering — it wasn’t like his mate to refuse food, especially warm-blooded fare — but as she pressed her forehead to his and fervently whispered his name, his reaction was blessedly instinctive. “Doe,” he murmured to her, crooning nonsense words in a low and guttural undertone, “my lovely girl, my mate.” He bathed her face in kisses, touching her tenderly, and though his mind was whirring wildly, connecting dots that could not be refuted but made no sense to him, he had the good sense not to ask the questions that bloodied his heels like a bluefish blitz. Why do you smell weird? Who’s been in your den? He was helpless in the face of her tears, which caused his hackles to spike along his spine and gripped his jaws in an immediate, unavoidable clench.

When he judged himself able to speak, “I know,” admitted the youngest Cairn in a surreptitious undertone. With the faith of a zealot whose god has yet to disappoint him, “He will come back to us, Doe,” the salt-white boy assured her. “He needs us more than ever now. Deirdre will heal the wounds we cannot see.” Perhaps he ought to have appeased her in a more solid, more substantial way, but Szymon had never been taught manners, etiquette, or tact. He groomed her, shifting his position to drag his tongue and fangs through the fur at her nape and traversing further down her spine to the places she could not easily reach due to her pregnancy. “He will come back and we will terrorize the coast,” he promised her, nursing the private knowledge that if push came to shove, he would willingly choose the woman over his own brother and likely die in the process. The thought was a sobering one, and he set to with a will, combing through her fur with nibbles and licks that were perhaps sharper than he intended.

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His voice, more than anything, seemed to do the trick. Downy ears laid back as his soothing words reached her, began to pluck and unravel the nerves and worries that'd taken root in the very heart of her. Doe, for her part, allowed herself to be soothed. For a moment she rested woodenly in his embrace, simply absorbing any comfort he had to give her. His words, nosensical at first, but then swiftly and firmly laying waste to her fears. What did she have to fear, after all, so long as she was with him?

Within the Cairn woman's heart, there was still a naive belief that Szymon could protect them from anything. The strength in his heart only grew by the day, and Doe admired him now more than ever. She had loved him first for his compassion and the light in his eyes, but he was turning into a creature so fine there were days it hurt to lay eyes on him.

Today was one of them. She felt wretched and small beside him, but it was a good kind of small, she thought. If she could just stay here forever, curled in his shadow, she could live a happy life. She felt better already, though she knew her fur was unkempt and that her breath stank like death. Her stomach burbled, and Doe reasoned that Szymon was probably right; that their king would surely get better as his wounds healed more completely, and she hated herself for it but a startled laugh escaped her as her silly, gorgeous, loving mate spoke of terrorizing the coast.

Nodding fretfully, Doe stretched herself out so that the man could continue his grooming and massaging. His teeth felt so good against her neglected skin - Doe hardly cared if he was a little rough. She'd always liked him that way, anyway.

Soon enough, though, her yellow eyes turned hungrily to the meat her lover had so kindly brought. It was a full beast, and though she would not eat all of it, Doe appreciated it that he had offered her an unsullied meal - the choicest cuts would go to her, and to Szymon if Doe could convince him to partake of them. She thought to give him the heart, though the symbolism might well be lost on her straight-forward mate.

Still, when she'd eaten her fill and dug the desired organ from the beast, Doe nudged it insistently toward him. She hoped he would not argue, and had already consumed the liver and loins to show that she was not depriving herself or his brood.

This post took a weird turn. Sorry! ♥

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Like his siblings before him, Szymon was a Cairn; and with that birthright came a relentless greediness — a hunger that never quit. In Szymon it mainly manifested itself through his attitude toward Doe. He had proclaimed his ownership of her in a way that no other male could boast; they had raised a daughter together and been blessed by the Sea Herself; and perhaps that should have been enough to satisfy him. For the most part, it was — Szymon was happy for the first time in his young life, and he guarded that happiness with ardor that bordered on obsession. Still, he recognized a growing restlessness within himself, new and uncharted, to which he could attach no name or reason. While his brother recovered from wounds won protecting Deirdre, Szymon prowled the shoreline and the territory borders, determined that the Cairn legacy be protected and upheld. He would always be softhearted; it was a trait he had no power to fight. He had proven, however, that he was no pushover — except when it came to his girls.

Perhaps therein lay the rub.

Szymon was a willing supplicant to Doe’s every whim. He was capable of providing for her and comforting her, grooming and feeding her — but he was incapable of controlling her in a way that her submissive nature demanded she be controlled. He was not the Leviathan, who ruled with fangs of roughhewn sea glass; nor was he Furiosa, who compelled and seduced. He watched greedily as she quieted in his embrace, his golden eyes alight with a feeling he now knew to be love — a feeling that she had awoken in him. They gleamed as she turned hungrily to her meal; like any good Italian grandmother, Szymon was immediately satisfied by the fact that she was eating. He watched, bemused, as she removed the beast’s heart and nudged it toward him with her own measure of Italian grandmotherliness — mangia mangia! Growling his thanks, he gripped the heavy muscle between his paws and ate — and oddly enough, her gesture was not completely lost on him. “What need do I have of this?” he asked, not unkindly, his bloodied lips and paws betraying how much he’d enjoyed the meal. “I already have yours.”

Even Cairns could be cheesy sometimes.

His grin was roguish as he licked the blood from his muzzle and helpfully leaned forward to bathe Doe’s face in turn, thinking nothing of the fact that he maybe still had strings of sinew caught between his molars. He wondered anew at the strange scent that he’d detected in the birthing den and, to a lesser extent, in the territory itself and in Doe’s fur. Wary of inciting her ire as he had the day of Qilaq’s Drop, now that she was acting more like herself, he again stilled his errant tongue and captured her with tenderness. With long sweeps of his tongue and fussy nips and nibbles along her spine, he continued to groom her, reassuring her in the only way he could that all was well and that Skellige would recover. An idea occurred to him. “Will you take a walk with me later?” he asked, formally courting her. He would continue to do so every day of his life.

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Doe watched with hooded eyes as her mate accepted the offered cut of meat. His joke brought a quirk to her lips, and she mused again about how much he'd grown since they met. He hadn't seemed like a wolf with a sense of humor there on that beach, but now his words were silly ones as often as they were serious. She wondered if this was the wolf he'd always been inside but had never been able to be on the outside, or if it was simply something she'd awoken in him. If he was just that commited to making her laugh, smile.

"Sweet one," she said with a long-suffering sigh, accepting his kisses and then reaching out her own tongue to clean the blood from his face and paws. "I would be lost without you, Sy. You keep me grounded - and for that, you can have any heart I posess."

She thought of Furiosa, and how she'd clung to the foreign woman like a savior from high. If Szymon had been there to keep her grounded, would she have had the same reaction? Perhaps, but Doe could never be sure. Reality twisted when the pallid male was not around, and after their quarrel on the day of Quill's drop, they'd spent a fair amount of time apart from each other. He was still dilligent in his duties to both herself and the pack, but Doe had felt the distance between them as keenly as if he'd gone away for good. It was no wonder she'd clung to the first presence she'd encountered, especially one that had reminded her so much of both her mate and the king they both served.

But still... there was something about the woman that made Doe shiver. Besides, she'd been sweet and kind, had shown caring toward the brood within her. A fickle woman, Doe could already feel the stirrings of love deep in her bossom.

She'd promised Szymon every heart she had, but did she have Furiosa's? Could she promise that one to her salty fisherman? Somehow, the idea seemed laughable to Doe. She could promise Osa's heart as easily as she could promise Szymon's, and she already knew that the man did not easily fall.

He woke her from her reveries with a gentle question, and Doe nodded at once, a smile softening her features at the idea. They'd been apart for too long, and she would relish any time he could give her. But first....

"I met a pale wolf at the borders - with eyes as black as the rocks that mark our borders," Doe told her husband, added the eye-color so that he would not fear the wraith he called a sister. "Her name is Furiosa. She's a part of Arturo's foundling pack, but she has the sea in her. I can smell it."

Rusty. Getting back in the swing of things! Posts may be clunky for awhile. ;-;
You got my 200th post, by the way!

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Szymon continued his gentle ministrations, finding a rhythm in grooming his mate that was as comforting to him as it appeared to be to her. His eyes drifted shut as Doe cleaned his face and paws in turn, a deep, rumbling sigh of contentment emptying his lungs. Pockets of tension that had gathered in his lean musculature without his realizing it melted away at their renewed closeness, and though he didn’t respond verbally to her sweet words, it was clear that he was only completely at ease when they were together. The only heart he wanted was well within his reach, he reflected, leaning forward to rub his cheek against Doe’s as she spoke of a pale wolf with dark eyes — one of Arturo’s wolves. He didn’t understand immediately why his rust-dappled wife had brought up the female — “Furiosa,” he repeated thoughtfully, carefully — but sensed there was a significance to this encounter and that he ought to tread lightly. “Is she important?” he asked her plainly, searching Doe’s face. Lest she mistake his shoddy wording for Furiosa’s importance to Arturo, “Like your Shadow or your Artemis,” he clarified.

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The way that her name sounded on his tongue sent a slight shiver up Doe's spine. She thought anything Szymon said sounded nice, so it wasn't much indication on whether or not this pairing was in the stars, but the little shewolf took it as a good omen all the same. He went on to ask after her, and Doe flattened her ears, restless and uncertain.

"I don't know," she admitted, moving to press against him once more. "I thought that she might make a good second wife for us - but I don't know it her spirit is pliable enough to twine together with ours."

I sound like my mother, Doe thought with a rueful flicker of ears. Her eyes were far-off, as if she could see the future by furrowing her brow enough. She did not see whatever reaction first appeared on Szymon's face. So familiar were these practices to the dusky shewolf that she forgot her mate had been raised in a different culture.

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The first expression that crossed the black-banded Cairn’s stern visage was fashioned not of emotion but of automatic acquiescence. The mutual grooming and shared meal had been healing for Szymon as much as Doe, and with the equilibrium restored in his world, he had slipped back into his old habit of indulging any and every whim that flashed through his plucky wife’s quicksilver mind. It was the words “second wife” that whipped back to haunt him, flying out of reach like a boomerang before winging back to knock him flat. “S-Second wife,” he repeated, keeping his tone quiet and even as he shifted, fitting his body securely around hers as he smoothed his tongue over a handful of flyaways at her nape. It surprised him that Doe would be willing to share him with another female, but the idea — despite being foreign and slightly panic-inducing — wasn’t altogether unpleasant. “Well,” he asked hesitantly, treading carefully, “what are second wives for? Watching cubs, or helping you when they come, or…?” He trailed off, tacking on another question as he placed a string of soft nips down her nape and shoulder: “Tell me about your Furiosa,” he commanded her, drawing out the name in a rumble that bore just the faintest hint of mischief.

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Oh. Doe rolled her eyes toward her cluless husband - she forgot, sometimes, how different they really were. He felt like home, now, and sometimes it was difficuly to believe they came from such contrasting places.

"A second wife is like a first wife, but second," she explained, partially teasing. It was a simple explanation, but a true one - she expected a second wife to be subservient to her as well as to Szymon, of course, which already placed Furiosa's possible claim to the title in a precarious position. Doe looked on her pale mate and twitched her ears in dissatisfaction. It'd been silly of her to bring it up - the three of them could never live together in peace, could they? "All those things," she agreed, still deep in thought. "And for companionship, like what we share. And for pups, should I ever fail to produce enough."

But it did not matter, truly. Doe was already letting go of the rangy woman in her heart - it was not meant to be. Still, she gave a wistful wag of her tail as she began: "Like the sea - dangerous and fierce. Her presence pulls you in like the tide, and I was almost swept away in her waves. But she spoke sweetly to me, and her tongue was soft. She told me I should switch out the sand for feathers in the birthing den - and I hadn't thought of that."

Her eyes were bright and loving as she looked on her husband. Even as she described Furiosa, she thought of how she would describe Szymon to another, and the woman felt she would never know enough words to do him justice. "But she was proud, and I think, now, that we should find a wife that would suit you better - one that will be as sweet to you as she is to me," Doe said gently.

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“A second wife is like a first wife, but second.”

In his fervor to understand, Szymon listened perhaps too closely. The cinnamon-spiced witch doctor’s quip was practically lost on him; a beat and a half too late, “Minx,” he accused his wife, and playfully mouthed at her scruff with an innocuous press of his canines. He fell silent as she explained further, his brow furrowing as he considered the idea. Though he couldn’t imagine Doe failing at anything, let alone producing children — a cause which was, in Szymon’s opinion, quite enjoyable to devote one’s time and effort to — he appreciated the idea of companionship. He worried about Doe when his responsibilities carried him away from her for any prolonged period of time; a “second wife” would provide succor and comfort whenever he was unable. Perhaps the idea of a “second wife” acting chiefly as a handmaiden or serving girl to Doe fell short of what the position truly entailed; still, it was the clearest picture Szymon could form, given his limited experience and imagination.

Jealousy blossomed when Doe began to speak favorably of Furiosa, and though Szymon himself had asked for the female’s description and therefore had no one but himself to blame, his tattered ears splayed comically like gull’s wings in displeasure that was only half-mocking. The bright and loving expression in Doe’s eyes soothed him infinitely; her golden gaze was limpid and warm, and he knew that it was for him that they seemed almost to glow. He couldn’t help blurting out, “How soft?” — because he thought such grumpiness might make her laugh, but also because he was actually curious. Resuming his nibbling and preening, he murmured to her with genuine gratitude, “I’m glad you didn’t get swept away,” referring not only to her swift attachment to Furiosa, but her two forays into the Sea’s wicked kingdom. “I’m glad you stayed.”

If it was feathers the Atoll wanted, Szymon would kill her a mountainful — and he would start with those awful gyrfalcons.

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She never got tired of teasing him, just as she never got tired of being teased by him in return. Doe nipped at his chin as he proclaimed her a minx, appreciating the jab for what it was. Too, she was amused to note the jealousy that sprung up in his eyes. There was a bit of guilt associated with causing him to feel such negative emotions, but she knew that they would weather this as they had weathered everything else.

"Not as soft as yours," she replied swiftly, still teasing as she pressed a kiss to his cheek. Her eyes softened as he went on, expressing his gladness that she remained with him. "I will never leave you or forsake you," she promised. "You're my best friend." And everything else.