Dragoncrest Cliffs Time will not slow down enough for me

The area surrounding Hougeda was heavy with foliage, unlike Ephraim's former home in the sound. It was more like the meadow his family had been in when the storm rolled through and frightened him into running through the night, but even there, the foliage wasn't so dense. He languished in the ferns and thick moss near Hougeda's entrance, chomping the tips of the grass that poked up between his wrists.

It was a lovely day, with a warm breeze blowing in from the sea and shaking the canopies of the redwoods. When he fled Ankyra Sound with his family, he hadn't had the time to pay attention to his surroundings, so the incredible sequoia trees had entirely escaped his notice. Now that he was back in the same sort of forest without the urgency of fleeing a bear, he was able to crane his neck to stare up at the leaves and marvel at how impossibly high up they were. They touched the very sky.

Kiwi wasn't sure what to make of the new young one who wasn't her siblings.  She hadn't met Portia's bunch yet, but the presence of an outside kid wasn't necessarily a good thing in her mind.  He wasn't mum or Nomi's, so whose was he?

She watched him from afar for a while, but finally, she couldn't take it any longer. So while he was staring at trees or whatever, she marched up, her little tail and head held high.  She was small compared to most, and always would be, but that didn't stop her from giving him major nose-wrinkle as she approached and looked at him closer.

"I don know you," She said blatantly, her tone almost accusing.  Unfortunately (likely) for him, she also said it in Trigedasleng... unaware that this wasn't a language a newcomer would know.

She makes frequent stops back to Hougeda, more than usual, since the kids have taken up residence. She’s given them the freedom of hougeda or the thick foliage where their new den has been settled. There’s enough adults around if they wanted to explore, someone would go with them, but it won’t be long before they have the freedom of the whole pack as fast as they’re growing.

On her way back to the rendezvous site, Thuringwethil stumbles across a rabbit den but leaves it untouched for now.

She hears Kiwi’s voice in baby Drageda tongue and Ephraim’s smell touches her nose. The boy had been there when they moved the other children and she wonders if it had been too much for them all at once. “You don’t remember Ephraim?” she queries to her daughter, reaching down and gently touching the top of her head with her nose. “He was with us the other day,” she adds, not realizing the intention behind Kiwi’s words weren’t literal but she smiles anyway. And, if Ephraim will allow, she moves closer to him for a gentle touch and lick in greeting.

Ephraim was older than Drageda's pups but might as well have been the same age; his mixed blood made him small, and developmentally, he had some catching up to do. Fleeing for their lives and getting by on minimal had not caused him to grow up faster, but to regress a step or two. Where once he had been bold, adventurous and even a bit arrogant, Ephraim was now uncertain and shy. When he looked away from the tree tops to see the solid brown pup headed his way, all authority and business, he shrank down without a second thought and snatched back his tall ears.

Words came out, but he couldn't grasp the meaning. There was something spidery about them that made him screw up his dark face. Ai dou nou get yu in, was what he heard, and he couldn't help but reply with a timid, "what?" They sounded like words but in an order that didn't make sense to him. The tone translated well enough, though, and the tip of his tail threatened toward a defensive curl, but then Thuringwethil arrived and his attention shifted up to the Heda.

"Hi," he breathes in greeting, accepting her touch with a faint and nervous smile. It was obvious by now she was important among the wolves here, like Caiaphas but different somehow. This similarity with his mother afforded her all the respect he could muster, even if he didn't quite understand it all. "I's Ephraim," he said, this time to the dark-furred Kiwi, whom he hoped would talk normally from now on.

She had all the respect and more for her mother most times, but the look she gave Heda was somewhat long-suffering for a pup of only 2 months old.  "He's strange."  She reiterated, not sure Heda was getting what she was saying, so of course she had to repeat it.  Then, in the other, she turned to him.  "You talk funny.  Like Tol." 

She wasn't sure still what to make of him, but she came forward to hopefully give him a sniff or two and find out.  Her demeanor wasn't exactly threatening... more curious.  But she wasn't shy about it either.

“Hi,” she says quietly in return before stepping back and standing above them. It’s a little strange to watch them interact as two tiny wolves with their own thoughts and actions. It’s one thing watching the littermates among one another but having to go through formalities? Fucking adorable.

However, Kiwi isn’t starting off the best with being polite to the nervous boy and she lowers her head and nips the girl’s nape but says nothing, taking a step back to observe how they interact with one another.

Em tripi, said the brown-furred Goufa, and Ephraim's ears began a slow drift toward his shoulders as he realized she was going to keep on saying things he couldn't understand. Isolation wasn't in his vocabulary and it would be some time before he understood what Kiwi was doing without intent, but he felt the sting of it all the same. He didn't know what she was saying, but took it with some smugness that made him feel nervous. Only when she spoke in his language did he perk up, and then immediately felt deflated again.

You talk funny. Hey, that wasn't nice! His tail beat shyly at his hocks as she approached to sniff at him and, in an effort to connect on some level, he declared, "you talk funny too." Then, as if he could somehow demonstrate, he attempted to repeat the strange phrase she'd used earlier while sniffing the air between them: "um traypee." Yeah, Ephraim was way off and had no idea what it meant, but he tried, damnit. His eyes flicked up to Thuringwethil as if for approval.

When her mother nipped to chide her, Kiwi frowned, not sure what exactly she'd done wrong.  It was true right?  The little girl was becoming aware that there were two manners of speaking, and she much preferred the one the inner pack circle used, but tended to slip between the two.  He was strange, and he did talk weird.

"Nooo." She said, shaking her head emphatically.  "'S Em tripi. Not that."  She wanted to argue that she talked perfectly thank you, but instead couldn't resist correcting, and giggling at his traypee.  

"Where's your moms?" She asked, looking around.  He looked about her age and it seemed she never went anywhere without some parent or other hovering (a fact that would change soon).  It didn't compute that he might not be alone, or that moms might have been an even odder question.

Kiwi corrected him and a hot stab of indignation poked him right in the chest. What? That was exactly what he said! "Um traypee," he repeated, frowning as his ears flicked forward and then back. There was an accent there he wasn't quite able to emulate yet, his tongue thick and clumsy in his mouth on the foreign sounds, so to him, they sounded alike. Maybe someday he would learn something of the pack's language and be able to speak a little of it, but it would take more effort than the cubs who were raised with it. He wasn't sure about putting effort into much of anything, so who could say if he would ever pick it up.

"S'wha' I said!" he insisted, as if somehow the fact he was wrong was the most offensive thing in the entire world. But he was too timid and unsure of himself here in Drageda to go further with the argument. Had this been Grimnismal, and Kiwi Raleska, whom she reminded him of, then it would have turned into a shouting match or a fight. He wasn't quite prepared to take on the fiery brown Goufa, though, especially not in front of Heda. Anyway, she asked another question that turned the burners off in him, and he tilted his head so that his ears flopped sideways.

"Moms?" he repeated, glancing between Kiwi and Thuringwethil as he slowly sank back into a sit. "I haves a mom. Keyfurs," he thought was her name, but who knows. "An' one pa, Krrkgrr," okay, so like, what the fuck, their names were really hard. "They're gone," he finished dolefully, then politely asked, "yer moms an' pas?"

Skipping Thur with permission!

Nope, he was wrong again, but aside from shaking her head, Kiwi didn't correct him a second time.  Not because she didn't want to - there were honestly few things the pup enjoyed more than correcting others! But because he answered her question, and he did it weirdly, and now she was curious.

"Pa? Whatsa pa?  I got moms."  She looked at Thuringwethil.  His were gone.  Well, he couldn't have hers.  It was bad enough sharing with Silkie and Bat and Tux, much as she loved them.  When it came to attention, she wanted all of it, and she took a small possessive step towards Thuringwethil.  "Where'd they go?"

Time would distance him from his parents enough that he might one day forget their faces—already the memories were hazier than they had been when he first got lost—but their names, he would always remember. And he would always remember having a mom and a dad, even though he would be raised in a pack whose prime litter had two mothers and no identifiable father figure. Ephraim was young enough still that this didn't strike him as odd in any way, especially once Thuringwethil explained it, but he still wondered how one got two mothers instead of a mom and a dad.

He would have liked to have two moms instead of his pa, who was a frightening wolf that Ephraim had always stayed away from. They'd spent no time together and so he never came to understand his father. He'd been too attached to Caiaphas to crave Kierkegaard's attention, and the ghoulish male terrified him anyway.

"A pa is like..." He had to stop and collect together his thoughts, but he didn't have the right words for what he wanted to describe. Instead, he puffed up all the hairs on his body and growled as lowly as he could in a horrible imitation of Kierkegaard's usual gruff take-no-shit warnings for his cubs; there had been nothing fun about the man, only discipline. "Pa is scary," he admitted.

Skipping and PPing Thur telling them about different kinds of families with permission!

Thuringwethil's explanation helped in the amount that ok, a pa was like a mom, but not.  After that, though, Kiwi didn't care enough to note further depth into it; she was young enough that this was all she needed to know.

Ephraime's depiction didn't seem like something she'd want instead of a mom, and unbeknownst to her, her thoughts followed pretty much the same line as his; she seemed to have gotten lucky gettin two moms.  "Like a bear," she stated, nodding.  It was what his gesture most reminded her of, though she'd never seen one herself.  Just heard stories.  He must have gotten away.  From what she heard of scary and bears, if you met either, you ran.  Good thing he came here!  Drageda was full of the best to fight scary things.  "Dun worry, imma learn to fight bears."  She said, puffing up a bit.