Ankyra Sound and welcomes little lasses in

Set directly after this. Editted bc I am sloooooow lmao

At the sound of Erzulie's anguished dirge to her lost companion, Svalinn lifted his head from the dirt and listened on grimly. He had curled up somewhere near the Blackpine for the night, but the haunting cry of his packmate unsettled the boy deeply, and he got to his feet without understanding why. As the notes of her cry fell away, another voice - strained and distant; from above - stole over the rippling, navy-washed Sound, in a gut-punch of a response that somehow felt more like relief than pain.

Rosalyn!

Svalinn tipped his skull back and howled in a show of solidarity - a high, youthful sound - meant only to reinforce the fact that Rosalyn had a family down here. She had something to stay alive for. We're here, he said. Rusalka is here.

Purged now of an ability to sleep, Svalinn shook himself and picked up a dogged clip towards the borders, eager to do something.

the blackpine had found a way to allow illidan to feel at home in the sound. the stretch of beach and various catacombs feigning as caves were not nearly what he had grown used to. though he had taken to the sea as a young child, the months that had aged him had happened far from the touch of the water. as much as he wished he could find a sense of peace, the wildling knew that it would take a great deal of time before he was able to stroll along the beach and know that he belonged there.

a call pulled his attention to a face that did not strike him as having been familiar. there was something about the lean-youthful frame of the other, but he knew well enough that it wasn't ephraim. still, the sandy coloration flared an anger inside of illidan that he was forced to quell. with a slow approach, the dark-hooded youth released a chuff to signal that he was there, and he was closing the distance between them.

For all the blood they didn't share, Svalinn suffered much in the same way as Illidan. They were wolves raised inland; sheltered, for all intents and purposes. The young wolf had tried to bring up these misgivings to his mother - that he and a life by the sea didn't feel right - but she had dismissed the ill omen without consideration and so had he. Except... he returned to the woods far more often than he would venture out onto the beach, or down into the drip-dripping grotto. His process of acclimation to the Strand (and the Sound in general) was going strenuously slow at best, and he couldn't imagine what might motivate him to turn seawolf faster.

His ears turned before his eyes towards his once foster-brother, and a feeling of resentment speared through him. He looked so much like Caiaphas that Svalinn was willing to bet he was of finer coastal stock than himself, though he would be wrong. He tried not to let it bother him too much, but he would be the first to admit that he had kind of avoided his long lost kin since being introduced to him. "Illidan," he ruffed, greeting the older boy's approach with a light wag of his tail before sobering once more. "Did you hear Rosalyn?"

the paler boy greeted illidan by name. the dark-hooded wildling dipped his head some and allowed a ghostly little smile to curl the edges of his dark lips. when he drew his sights back up, he was suddenly surprised at the growth that had occurred on svalinn. once a child who had to be carried between his father and mother, now a strapping young figure with a golden touch to his lean frame. he wondered what he must have looked like to this sibling, or if the younger man had any opinions at all on the matter.

“i heard you call to her,” the young savage responded in a surprising baritone. his hawkish yellow gaze darted toward his brother for a moment before he canted his head ever so slightly to the left. “has something happened?”

there was an awkward furrowing of his brows, feeling as though he had missed out on a monumental event. illidan had done his best to keep to the borders of the sound. in turn, he had missed out on a great deal of socializing with the others – recruits and prospects alike. it was for the best that he deterred himself from the company of those who were seeking a home; he was certain that they would not be impressed with his companionship. even in that regard, illidan believed that his mother was more capable.

Though raised under the iron saddle of Eyjolfur traditions and standards, Svalinn's greater inclinations weren't of the same quick-witted and introspective qualities that his pseudo-littermates seemed to have been born with. For where his hooded brother could reflect on his shortcomings as a packmate, the same concept was completely elusive to this younger wolf - even as ammunition to use against his most natural rival. The fact that he knew this and Illidan didn't was almost entirely irrelevant besides the fact that he now had to fill him in on what had transpired.

"Roslyn went missing, and Ma found evidence that the wolves on the cliffs took her," he disclosed succinctly while his features devolved into a ravening scowl. "I heard her howl back to Erzulie not too long ago. Sounded like it came from there," he added, repositioning himself so that he might motion towards a particular stretch of the jagged skyline, overrun with invaders and kidnappers.

there was a good chance that svalinn gave illidan more credit than he had earned, based solely on the idea that he resembled their mother a great deal in coloration. there were many things that the creamy boy had learned that had turned him into an eyjolfur – things that the wildling had missed entirely during his stay with the wolves of the plateau. the hooded man had learned more about thoughtfulness than he ever would have beneath the quick whip and sharp tongue of his blood mother. now, that didn't mean those lessons had actually taken hold of the boy; just that he had been given an opportunity to learn from them.

when his brother spoke of the cliff wolves having taken one of their own, illidan furrowed his brows. instinct curled his lip over a dagger-like canine, and the hairs along his neck and shoulders seemed to rise further than they already were in a natural state. “we're going to retrieve her, are we not?” illidan demanded of his brother with a quick glance toward the younger wolf. in the sharp yellow of his gaze was a fire, doused in gasoline and burning with a rage he had long since put to bed.

Svalinn met the hooded lost boy's gaze for a split second, and he was stricken with a feeling he could not place; an inkling of nostalgia as he recalled features from Kierkegaard's indomitable countenance. This was likely to be his first and only experience on the matter, as he could not truly remember the ghostly savage, apart from what he was told, and soon any recollection at all of such a fierce phenotype would be exclusively associated with Illidan himself. He hesitated to answer, as he had mostly been reliant on Caiaphas, and (to a lesser degree) Raleska to make the big decisions in his life, and he wasn't sure what was going to happen yet.

He wanted to go after Rosalyn, of course, but... "It just smells like too many of them."

cowards, he thought with a glare toward the high cliff. what kind of creatures would boast that they were strong when they behaved in such ways? that they would steal a member of another pack and hold them hostage in their fortress on the hill. it was pompous and pathetic; illidan saw only that the wolves on the cliffs were sad creatures with little capability. there was likely little that would change this speculation. they had given him only a few things to base his opinion on, and none of them had been good.
 
illidan did not need to know them to know that they were weak without each other. if he could get them alone, he imagined that they would not be capable of much. with that as a thought, he turned his sights to svalinn and frowned. “then we will have to pick them off and dwindle their numbers,” the young ghost remarked.

Illidan's remark drew a smirk across Svalinn's features; his tail lashing as he imagined setting upon the cliff wolves one by one, snuffing them out like rabbits. It was clear that he preferred this method, mostly because he could not fathom the path himself, but also because he was a wolf not capable of any stratagem beyond his own reactionary instincts. He just wasn't naturally suited for necessities like "planing ahead," but what he lacked in forethought, he compensated for through his devotion— if not to his own convictions, than to those of others.

And because he was so young, it only took these words from his surrogate brother for him to surmise that Illidan was intelligent enough to respect fully, even if they had not or would not always get along.

"Let's practice," he nodded firmly, with a mischievous glint in his chestnut eyes and a bow to accompany the pseudo-challenge. In his mind, if they were going to be performing any ambushes, they needed to keep their reflexes sharp.

I believe a million years ago I promised to make this a trade thread xD

i'm the worst. would you like to fade this out and have an up to date one?

whether or not they got along, illidan would always have considered the gold-touched male as his brother. he had even thought that it was curious his parents had taken the child with them when they were already struggling to feed themselves. after ephraim’s disappearance, illidan almost believed the svalinn had been sent there to fill the void of a missing brother. while that might have been a terrible though to have, he had carried it with him for some time. it was what helped him cope with accepting the stranger into their folds and calling him one of their own. it had done well to ease the burn of the loss of his other siblings, too.
 
with the invitation to spar, illidan sprung forward. his long legs carried him quickly so that the space between them was minimized. this was where they tousled and snapped until they had worn themselves to the bone. by the time they had finished their practice, illidan felt like he had already taken on the entirety of drageda and won. he hoped that it would be that easy when they finally struck.