Sequoia Coast clocks and calendars don't work in night vale

It is late when she slips from Drageda’s borders, another sleepless night. It is not every night and sometimes not even every other night. There is no pattern to it, leaving her in a guessing game to figure out if she’ll fall asleep or not. If Blixen is in the cavern, even if not near her, she finds it easy to rest after a while. This night, the girl hadn’t been there and she laid restless on the cold floor until she couldn’t take it anymore and slipped out beyond the northern borders and into the opening once she breaks away from the redwoods. The cliffs have tapered down to a hilly decline, a light dusting of snow, and the roar of ocean waves to greet her when she reaches the bottom.
 
She hasn’t spent much time in the northern reaches other than border patrol but even then, she finds herself near the southern end for a number of reasons. Artaax had killed a wolf there and Arrille has to be out there somewhere. The girl sighs, trying to clear her mind of whatever stress has chosen to plague her.
 
When the ground turns sandy, and the moon bright in the sky, she steps out onto the beach the opens up and watches he waves come rolling in.

218

She had never been fortunate enough to see the ocean before, however she had once bribed a lost seagull to tell her stories of it. “Beautiful and mesmerizing” he had told her. What a load of bs that was... She could barely see right in front of her let alone the ocean that was still a good stretch away. Her only clues that warned her where the water crashed was the sound of breaking waves and the dim moonlight that danced across the water’s surface. Who would ever want to stay here?

But oh of course there was always one. Just as the thought entered her mind, a light breeze coincidentally came swirling by to reveal a whole spew of new smells. The candle lit girl inhaled deeply, nose burning greatly while doing so. A stranger’s scent was briefly detected among the other aromas, however it was greatly overpowered by sea spray and fish stank. With a shrug of her shoulders, Rose pressed on in the direction from which the wind came, nose wiggling profusely while doing so.

It had been relatively easy to get used to the ocean but she didn’t really have the time to spare. She’s grown fond of it, at least. The repetitive crash of water against the sandy shores offers a rhythm that lures her to sleep—when she can—and she easily loses track of herself when she can’t. The wind whips off the water and rustles her fur, causing anything behind her to go unnoticed, leaving her unknowingly vulnerable. The clear sky creates a loneliness around her and she shifts her weight uncomfortably, sitting down somewhere out of reach of the tide and remains oblivious to her newest companion.

108

It took but only a few minutes of aimless wandering in order to come across the blurred silhouette sitting in the distance. Rose paused for a moment, shook the sand stuck between her toes free, and then continued on towards the oblivious stranger. Her nose twitched once close enough to get a more detailed description of the stranger’s scent. The first thing that stuck out was the mingled scents of other wolves woven within the youth’s own. Rose made a mental note that should her new companion be not so welcoming, It’d probably be best to flee rather than fight. 

The only other thing she was able to pick out was the familiarity of sea that was tangled within the stranger’s coat. There was a good chance she knew the place better than Rose did, and that put an uneasy feeling within the yearling’s stomach. Still, the flame pelted girl stayed put and let out chuff to announce her presence, silently hoping the other wasn’t in a foul mood.

When the chuff first reaches her ears, she doesn’t think much of it. The sounds of the waves are loud enough to muffle any outside noise and engulf it into its own. After a few seconds, and a slight shift in wind, she notes the feeling of someone else around her. Slowly, Furi turns her head to look over her shoulder to see another wolf. She’s young but unfamiliar and her whole form stiffens, discovering she all of a sudden has more questions than before. How long has the other been there? And why? She narrows her eyes a little but remains silent, looking her over in the pale moonlight.
 
“Hey,” she finally decides to say after a moment, though she makes no other move for invite. It’s the best thing she can come up with and her cheeks turn warm with embarrassment. Real creative. Furi averts her gaze a little for a few seconds to gather herself but she returns it, shifting her weight so that she’s facing the stranger rather than awkwardly looking over her shoulder.

178

The other’s voice, though drowned out by the background, did fall upon the yearling’s ears. Rose shifted herself atop the sand, awkwardly wiggling her toes while trying to figure out what to say in return. “Hey” she repeated after her companion, voice a little louder than usual. Say something else she thought internally, her mind desperately trying to come up with an idea. “Do you like the ocean?” she suddenly asked then, eyes shifting to rest upon the waves in the distance. It wasn't the most creative thing she could have said, but at least it broke the awkward tension between the two, if even for just a moment.

She’s pretty.

Furi’s eyes narrow a little when the other responds with the same greeting. It makes her feel a little less awkward but it doesn’t go away. She realizes how often she actually feels like this.

Tell her she’s pretty.

She bites her lip, watching the other. She tightens her jaw, unable to trust herself. The other doesn’t close the distance but she does have to shout so the other hears and Furi decides to take a few steps forward. There’s plenty of space between them but the ocean isn’t roaring in her ears as closely and the wind no longer follows any sense of direction.

“Yeah, I guess,” she answers after a second, though it doesn’t seem very convincing. Furi shrugs a shoulder but doesn’t elaborate anymore. “I’m Furi. Are you from around here?”

136

Furi. It was short and simple, much like the yearling’s own. Rose wondered if there was any meaning behind it, however she didn’t bother asking since a question had already been tossed up in the air. “No, I’m from...” she trailed off not really knowing what exactly to say. “I guess I’m from a little bit of everywhere” she answer with a shrug. She hadn’t intended to sound so vague, but honestly didn’t have a clue as to what else she was supposed to say. “I’m Rose by the way” she finally introduced, the faint beginnings a smile following closely behind.

Her answer doesn’t really give her any insight but she supposes there isn’t much she would do with it anyway. She glances down to her feet, covered in sand and still missing some fur. It’s growing back in different colors than before but she hadn’t noticed that before. Her brows bury between her eyes and she looks up a second later when Rose introduces herself. Fitting, she thinks and she huffs a breath of air, masking the smirk trying to form.
 
“I haven’t been this far up,” she explains. She’s explored a ways south, and some of the mountain range with Eske, but that can hardly be considered scouting. Still. Furi opens her mouth to say something else but at the exact same moment, a strangled, audible gasp surprises her. She snaps her jaws shut, widens her eyes, and stares at the wolf across the way. Again, her cheeks heat with embarrassment and she’s about to curse herself for that when it happens again, this time with a closed mouth and an entire shake of her torso. Ugh, she thinks. Hiccups. Awkwardly, she laughs but it’s soft, interrupted by louder convulsions of her esophagus.

194

Her ears twitched atop her head as Furi explains she is just as new to this patch of land as Rose is. It puts a comforting feeling within the yearling’s chest and Rose lets out a soft hum just as the girl finishes her sentence. It looked as if Furi was about to speak again, but she was interrupted by her own hiccup. “Pffttt” Rose blurted out, her cheeks hurting from trying to contain the laughter. Quiet chuckles escaped her while she watched her companion flush with embarrassment. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to laugh” she offered, hoping she hadn’t hurt her feelings or anything. But she had to admit it felt good to laugh and let loose a little, it had been so long she had done so after all. “Try holding your breath for a couple of seconds, it might cure them” she suggested while lifting up a paw to wipe away an imaginary tear from her watery eyes.

The sound of Rose’s laughter quickly puts a smile on her face, easing any tension, but it’s disrupted by another violent hiccup. And another. She laughs again, struggling to catch her breath all of a sudden until the other starts to quiet and she follows suit with soft chuckles beneath her breath. The next hiccup lifts it again but it drops just as quickly. “It’s okay,” she says, having laughed a little harder than she should have herself. “You think that will really work?” she asks but, without leaving room for an answer, sucks in a deep breath and holds herself.
 
And five seconds later, another hiccup releases like a bat out of hell and an unnatural sound leaving her throat. Furi can’t contain her next bought of laughter.

129

Rose jumps at the sudden unnatural sound that spills from the girl’s throat but quickly follows after with pleasant laughter. “I guess not” she adds with a half-shrug. It was a technique that worked only when luck was on your side and it appeared the multi shaded female wasn’t so fortunate. “There are other tricks like lying upside down, or chugging water” she pauses, glancing out to the ocean for a moment “but that water doesn’t look or smell very appetizing.”

Furi continues to hiccup every few seconds as Rose offers a few other suggestions. She turns over her shoulder and looks out to the ocean, remembering that it doesn’t taste very good. Still, she considers it but her nose wrinkles and she decides against it. Perhaps if they move further north they’ll find fresh water but it’s late and she doesn’t feel like going too much farther. The only other option—at least that Rose offers—is lying upside down and she already feels the embarrassment seeping in just at the thought. Maybe, if she waits long enough, they’ll go away, but they don’t and she huffs a sigh of frustration.

Instead of dropping on the sand, Furi moves back through the dunes and out of the worst of it, though she doesn’t leave the girl behind. She drops carefully to the ground and begins to roll over, waiting to see what happens next.

154

A few moments pass as Furi seemingly debates between options, eventually settling on what Rose believes to be the more convenient choice. She trails after the girl until they reach their new destination, watching closely as the other moves to roll on her back. Rose turned blank for a moment, not really sure if she should watch her or look away. Staring seemed creepy, like really creepy and averting her gaze just felt like it would make things weird. After a short second of thought, Rose moved next the girl and positioned herself so that she too would be belly up. 

“Soooo, the stars are really pretty tonight” she said in as much of serious tone as she could muster. Not even a second later did a loud snort follow, blowing away any and all seriousness that might have been genuine. She felt ridiculous and looked the part too, but Rose wanted to get lost in the brief happiness she found, if even for just a moment.

Furi doesn’t realize Rose is getting closer until she’s getting on the ground too. Her head turns to see from the corners of her eyes that the other girl is mimicking her position. She doesn’t even notice she hasn’t hiccupped in more than a minute.
 
After a few seconds of looking at her new friend, Furi turns back to the sky to see the bright stars above them. Without so many clouds, she doesn’t expect snow or anything for at least a few more days, and she focuses on those that shine bright. “They are,” she agrees after a moment. She shifts her position just a little to make it more comfortable on her back as she studies the expanse set out before them.

124

Rose stares quietly into the endless void for a moment, eyes wandering as she picks out the most significant stars. “You think there’s anything out there?” she questions, glancing over to catch the girl’s reaction. She wanted to believe there was something more in life, that there was another world waiting for them after death here. But that dream was a child’s fantasy at best, and Rose didn’t put much faith into her theory. 

She turned to face back towards the sky, eyes squinting while she lifted a paw up in front of her face. “I think there’s something else out there. Something more than all this.” 

As she lays in silence for the next little bit, she simply enjoys it. Rose thinks the stars are pretty without being prompted in a similar fashion Blixen had. She could tell she didn’t enjoy it as much as she did, or understand what little she knows, and so to have someone genuinely interested that even asks questions fills her with something she doesn’t know how to explain. “I don’t know,” she says after a moment of consideration. “I guess I never… really thought about it.”

Furi falls silent after that, glancing over to see the way Rose holds up her paw. Pale green eyes linger for a moment before she moves back up, thinking about a whole new realm of possibilities. It has always simply been the sky, with the sun and moon and stars. That’s where they lived and that was that, except for the few times they fell from the sky and land among them. It has been a long time since she’s seen the meteors and she sometimes questions whether or not it had been real, but it had only been brought on by Blixen’s doubt.

Then she realizes her hiccups are gone. Huh. She doesn’t get up now that the trick has worked, but she’s just as content to stay in place.

“I saw the stars fall, once,” she tells her, glancing over to gauge her reaction but she fears she’ll get the same response as the last person she told. “I chased them across the sky until I found them landed in a field, floating.” Nervously, she bites her lip again, looking away to avoid any sudden rejection.

274

Rose is silent as the girl speaks, her admiral eyes content to watch the night sky while her companion tells of her story. Falling stars. What a sight that must have been. The flame coated yearling rolled on her side to face her new friend, eyes burning bright with interest. “It must have been beautiful” she starts off with, her mind desperately trying to imagine what the field must have looked like while lit up with the sky’s unexplainable beauty. For a moment she is satisfied with this image, but Rose’s thirst for knowledge was unquenchable and she wished to know more if she could.

“What was it like? Were they hot or cold? Did they look like they do in the sky?” she paused, the realization hitting her that she might be suffocating Furi with all of her questions. Her face turned to an apologetic look while waiting to hear if her questions would be answered.

Furi glances from the sky to Rose. When Blixen hadn’t believed her (even if she tried), she’d been embarrassed. It made her feel like she’d been mistaken, or that she is too child-like, and she needed to know somethings just weren’t real. And it didn’t matter if she’d seen it, or her brother, she started to believe she’d been wrong.

She doesn’t have to think about Ceallach, though, or how sad her father looked that night. Instead, she’s given the chance to recollect seeing the stars float among them. Her ears fall back against her head and she slowly begins to roll back over. There isn’t much grace with such long legs but after a moment, and a little upheaval with loose sand, she’s back upright, mimicking her companion’s form.

“They were smaller than I thought but they didn’t last long and by the time I got close to one, it would go out,” she says, having not noticed they’d light up and fade away, as if carefully planned by an actual thing. “But they didn’t feel like anything, I guess? I… didn’t try to eat them,” she explains. It seems like a funny thought at first and she smiles, wondering what stars taste like.

205

It had never occurred to Rose that stars might be alive rather than just pointless things in the sky. However at the mention of them fading away, the candle lit girl couldn’t help but wonder if they were breathing creatures such as herself. A spew of new questions and ideas flooded her mind, a mild headache coming along with them. “I wish I could have seen them” she thinks aloud, her voice not much louder than a whisper.

At the girl’s second comment, Rose couldn’t help but let out a soft giggle. “I doubt they would have tasted very good.” Something about trying to eat them seemed wrong, kind of like trying to eat somebody else’s food, you just don’t do that...

Rose gets quiet and Furi notes the change in the air between them. It’s subtle, and she isn’t entirely sure about it, but when she speaks, she can barely hear what she says. She doesn’t try to pry for information, or why her demeanor changed, but she does wait and see what will come of it. A soft giggle eventually comes out of her companion and Furi smiles, tail thumping against the ground. “No, probably not,” she agrees, looking back to the sky. She was starting to feel tired, and a little cold from the ocean air, and she can’t fight the instinctual shiver that runs down her spine.

“Where are you going after this?” she asks, realizing she isn’t a member of Drageda and she might not be here if Furi leaves to try and get some sleep. Maybe, like Witchbaby, she isn’t too far away and this won’t be the one and only time she gets to see her newest friend.

163

Not sure what to do or say next, the topic of stars having gradually come to an end, Rose decides to wait and see if Furi has anything to say. And she does, with a question this time around. Where to next? Rose hadn’t thought about it much, didn’t really want to think about it either. She had a horrible sense of direction but the yearling trusted her feet, and she would let them lead her to wherever they desired. “I’m not sure” she answers with shrug, not as concerned as she should be. 

Perhaps she would travel south to see if the invading pack was still at Golden Glade or maybe she’d take a trip over to the Vale. Who knows, she might even try to visit the glacier where she’d last seen her brother.

Rose doesn’t give her a lot of information. She doesn’t tell her where she’s going or, better, where she could find her. Instead, she doesn’t seem to know. Does that mean she doesn’t have anywhere to go? She’s already admitted to not being from her, and it had been vague enough that she can’t rely on that, either. Her lips twist into a frown but the darkness hides most of it. The thought of Arrille slips into her mind and where he may be, knowing if he doesn’t stay on the coast or take her off, she may never see him again. She made the effort, though, and that’s about all she can do.
 
“You don’t have to go anywhere, if you don’t want to… I mean,” she says though her mouth turns sour, uncertain what she’s really saying or what she really wants. “My pack isn’t far and,” she takes a breath, not sure what to say or what she should say, or maybe she’s overstepping all together. Maybe she’s misread the entire thing and her friend doesn’t care that she doesn’t know where she’s going. “It’s getting cold.”

190

Rose wasn’t sure what she was expecting Furi to say, but an invitation to her pack wasn’t one of them. A lump formed in her throat and the yearling found herself unable to form the words she wanted to say. And then suddenly her voice came back to her. “Is it ok?” Rose questions, not wanting her newly made friend to get in trouble at her expense and certainly not wanting to find herself at the receiving end of a pack’s wrath. She left room for an answer to her previous question before adding “I don’t want you to get in trouble or anything.” 

Rose didn’t know how she felt about the suggestion and couldn’t help wonder if the offer was only for tonight or for longer than that. However Rose decided it best to keep her curiosity to herself for now, because if Furi was definitely right about one thing, it was that it was getting cold out.

The question seems like an odd one and she looks away, mulling it over, trying to figure out a reason she might can in trouble. It’s late and maybe she shouldn’t bring a stranger to the borders and disturb those who might be asleep. They might be awake but she doesn’t want to risk it, so a frown presses onto her features. “Well, no, but…” she trails off, then looks around them. “It is late. We could find somewhere warm for the rest of the night and go in the morning?” she offers, unaware Rose isn’t sure of her initial meaning. She offers her new friend a smile.

108