Swiftcurrent Creek Under the kitchen lights, you still look like dynamite
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Ooc — Chelsie
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All Welcome 
@Tiercel was somewhere behind her, no doubt causing a racket in pursuit. For all the enthusiasm and energy her black-furred child possessed, she was stuck with stubby legs and couldn't possibly keep up with a Wylla who wanted to keep just out of her sight. Thanks, Lusca, for your long legs and fleet body. She scampered along the creek's edge, mindful of the slippery rocks, and left her scent against the trees as she shouldered roughly past them. This was tracking practice for her daughter, but it was educational on more than one level, for Wylla had a plan.

Without warning, she collapsed in the center of a clearing where the creek could be heard but not seen. She hit the ground hard on her shoulder, but kept her face impassive, even though it smarted. She skidded lightly on the dirt before coming to a halt, nearly face-down and looking very much like she'd been conked out by an anvil dropping on her head. Drawing a painfully slow breath in through her nostrils, Wylla felt her rib cage go still and lightly closed her eyes as she awaited Tiercel's arrival.
i found brimstone in my garden,
i found roses set on fire
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DO YOU WANT TO GO LOOK AT THE FISHES?

it was a cruel trick. cruel and cold like winds on the sea!

unlike Wylla who had been forged in the same irons as Hermes himself, Tiercel was not so anatomically blessed. her knobby legs made for a hairy pursuit over log-rot and waterside stones that, in proportion to herself, might as well have been monoliths. sometimes she disappeared from view, having tripped or stumbled over inconveniently arranged pebbles or tripwire disguised as tree branches littered across the path Wylla easily navigated. it was bullshit. 

she zip-zoomed past most of the efforts made to activate the pathfinder within, ducking under the hands of fir that raked over her spine as she pursued a dicey course alongside the creek. there was clearly very little consideration here for her safety, but that’s rock n roll baby. literally, sometimes. hit a rock and roll into the current baby.

”TEEEEEEWW FAAAAAAAAATHHHH,” she blustered miserably to Wylla, alas, from somewhere in the distance. the  prey in jurassic park didn’t complain as much as her child did on this day, and it was doubtful that her mother would even hear any of her faint quibbles over the tinkle (very serene 10/10) of the creek. by the time the dust kicked up by the grown wolf’s heels had settled, Tiercel had already lost sight of her target to the horizon’s effulgent flare. she brake-checked herself as a deer bounded across the length of the river. ”way der!” she panted out, staring with distracted wonder at the trembling thicket the buck had departed through.  

her head swiveled alertly, eyes scanning the treeline for twinkle-toes. instinctively, her nose dragged the ground as she clipped stumblingly over sedge hummocks and kept the entire neighborhood posted re: Wylla’s unauthorized absence. ”MUUUUUUUMMAAHHHHHH!” visible frustration radiated from her a.her nostrils huffed and dapped the water, finding nothing of immediate interest, and then moved to dry land, then to the trees, until her effort to canvass every inch of approximately three-ish feet paid off—recognition beconed like a sonar echo on her primitive mental chart of Smells And Stuff. using this chart and her nose she was able to faintly trace her parent’s trajectory and follow it away from the creek until the water was just out of sight and Mother was once more a tangible concept instead of lesson in object impermanence, her thin frame wilted into the earth. 

this wasn’t an instantaneous cause for concern, given in the young girl’s mind how many blinks it took to find her here. sooooo many of them. her features lit up as soon as her nose positively verified her identity, pace picking up to a gamely speed as she approached the motionless lump of her mother’s lanky behind. nothing weird about this scene, just a wolf ostriching in the dirt. ”the der.” she wheezed, her brain still buffering the events leading up to her discovery. ”it goes way, osso fath.” why was everyone so fast? was there a trigger for speed boosters she didn’t know about or…

well, acknowledgment would have been nice. Tiercel’s tail waved through the air, her large ears knocking about on her crown as she made a short piaffe to Wylla’s side and yanked her fur, leaping away quickly with the full expectation to be nipped at for her straight-to-business method of inciting a reaction.

”ma, tew tied?” she asked, and when her (explicit) question went unanswered, she backed her rump into some bushes and followed up with a louder, much less patient reiteration of it. say is TEW TIED? her eyes were drawn to the crater-trail, imagination filling in some blanks. if this looney tune extinction event was to be true, then it was straight-up comical how her entrance to life was identical to her mother’s exit from it. 

unable to conceive of death without any prior exposure to the scope of its perseverance, the child simply sat on her butt and boredly kicked a twig into the grass with a sigh that was almost just too dramatic for such little lungs to produce.

she could outstay the irreversible exploits of nature, sure thing no problem.
1/3 threads. lowp, tag 2 manifest
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She listened to the rustle of the leaves until the time that Tiercel arrived, in a huff and with a story on her tongue. It was everything Wylla could do not to smirk into the dirt; her kid was cute but also imagination. The der was osso fath. Wylla agreed, but to give any indication of liveliness would ruin her game, and she couldn't possibly do that.

As ever, her single offspring was bound to make it difficult to keep up the charade. First she had to stifle a wince and the urge to whirl around and snap at her daughter when her fur was pulled. Some more babbling from the black-furred babe threatened to make her ears twitch but she fought it. It was like fighting an itch, and she could almost feel the figurative sweat beading on her forehead. TEW TIED? hollered Tiercel, and Wylla pressed her eyelids tighter together.

You're dead, you can't move, not even an inch, she told herself as she waited for Tiercel to finally realize that this was a Problem.
i found brimstone in my garden,
i found roses set on fire
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#4
after so many seconds of sitting there with nothing to be entertained by, absentmindedness quickly filed in. Tiercel blustered a sigh and peered around the crime scene, making bored popping noises with her mouth as she cast about in quest of something to captivate her attention while she waited for her mother to putrefy. 

a dragonfly glided by and she swiped halfheartedly at it with her paw, but her view of the jettisoned remains of Wylla’s soma sharpened back into focus. ”MAAAA!” she bellowed, full of impatience. with a tween’s petulant stomp Tiercel rocked to her feet and pranced back over to the unmoving shape of her mother, poking her nose into a silver lobe and flitting her tongue out to wake her up with a clammy wet-willy—right down the canal. 

sorry mommo, existential lessons are hard to instruct when your pupil’s comprehension of death is exactly nonexistent. you gotta rub some stank on it to get the message across.
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A more disciplined wolf might have succeeded where Wylla was destined to fail, and fail she did. It was a slow but nonetheless spectacular unfolding of her wits, beginning with an unbidden twitch of her brow. There, upon the inky sweep of her mask, settled a curious wasp. She could feel its feet and imagined it was a spider, a thought that made her want to cringe, but she fought the urge for a little while.

It wasn't possible to fight it when Tiercel's tongue began to probe the inner folds of her ear; she resisted for approximately two seconds before she screwed up her entire face and flicked her ear. At the same time, the wasp became bunched in the creasing of her brow and, exasperated, delivered a sweet stinger's kiss right to her eyebrow that made her eyes fly open.

"Ow, fuck!" screeched a very much alive Wylla as she tore herself up from the furrowed ground, dislodging her intrusive tongue waggling pup in the process, and snapped at the wasp while it buzzed away. "Fuu-huh-huck," she lamented, prancing in place as pain blossomed from the site of the sting, which was sure to swell rapidly. She turned her scowl upon her impatient daughter, who had most definitely caused this by not getting the point of the lesson, and bellowed, "this is your fault!"