Sun Mote Copse Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown...

@Finley 

Wraen's frostbites had healed somewhat, enabling her to hobble around. A trained healer would have frowned at her recklessness, but the girl knew that there was only so much time she could spend doing nothing. Any more and she would go crazy and a mad Wraen with a dark, thundering, lightening and raining cloud above her head was not someone you wanted to meet. On any day. 

So she was on the move, though often she had to stop and even more frequently decide on more creative ways on, how to not aggravate the tender flesh of her toes. Therefore a passerby would find the awkward and silly gait of the she-wolf amusing. She reached a small, frozen creek and when her paws made contact with the solid and smooth surface of the ice relief washed over her expression. This was just, what she had needed, and this was, where she remained standing with eyes closed and a serene look of feel-good.

Fin felt weird. Not the usual kind of weird either, but the emotionally unstable weird. It wasn't typical for her to go into her season so early in the year, but she supposed it was closer to her norm than last year had been. With a pang, she considered Tywyll and Cinder - her two little boys who would be an entire year old soon. Maybe this timing wasn't actually weird at all. Maybe it was just... time.

Ugh. She was thinking too deeply. Why did her hormones make her think so deeply. She needed to find Elwood and start getting plowed.

She was mate-hunting when she came across Wraen - someone she had not yet met and was lucky enough to happen upon her when Wraen could make the best first impression. Fin blinked at the girl in curious confusion, watching as she stood there with her paw on the ice, looking as though she was getting a full body massage. She decided to hit the pause button on her mission to get knocked up and figure out what this was all about real quick.

"Uh... are you trying to become one with the ice or something?" Fin asked as she stepped up beside her packmate, a small smirk on her face as she quirked a brow at her.

Wraen turned and met a spitting image of her late friend Liffey. She stared at her with wide-eyes, mouth a little agape in wonder, then remembered that this might not be too polite. And shut the mouth, but forgot to stop staring. The fact that she had been asked a question hit the base seconds later, making her look down at her feet and attempting to move them and deny the whole ordeal, except she could not. Well, technically she could, unless she wanted to tear her feet, which had suffered already.

"Ummm... no," Wraen shook her head in denial, but her expression was still concerned. Great way to get to know your friend's mom - frozen to the lake and unable to move. "You are Liffey's mother, right?" she asked then a bit too brightly, sitting down and deciding to pretend that nothing bad had happened. She could solve freezing issues later.

Finley grinned as her packmate answered the question. She quirked a brow and glanced at the girl's paw, which she didn't appear to be able to move. "Did it happen anyway?" she asked, just a beat before a question popped out of the girl's mouth and took her by surprise.

"Yeah, I am," she answered, looking up at the girl's face and furrowing her brow thoughtfully. A memory triggered - Wildfire talking about her recruits and one of them being someone Elwood recognized from visiting Sunspire. She couldn't remember what they'd said her name was, though... She was so terrible with names."Oh you're the one who was at Sunspire with her, right? Uhh... Ray... Ray... Uh... Ray..bies?" she paused, realized, and then added, "I'm gonna venture a guess and say your name isn't Rabies."

Finley was old, smart and observant, Wraen blushed and felt embarrassed as a kid, whose mum has caught him stealing jam from the pantry. "Kind of, yeah," she nodded, looking defeated, but also surprisingly at ease as well. The Blackthorn matriarch did not look the least bit phased or amused by her rather painful state.

"Ray-bee? That's a new one. I will save it for future use," Wraen agreed cheerfully and then corrected. "I am Wraen. I don't think that we have met before, but you two are so much alike," she said and having forgotten her earlier issue with getting frozen to the ice - moved. She got free, but not without leaving a fleshy pair of footprints, where she had stood earlier. 

"I am free!" she told Finley, tail wagging, then plopped down on her stomach and began to groom the sore spots on her paws.

Fin smirked as she added the name Rabies to her repertoire. What an odd lady. She couldn't remember meeting the girl, but didn't doubt that Elwood had. Just because they were perpetually joined at the hip didn't mean they were always together, after all. Wraen went on to remark about how similar Finley looked to her daughter and she felt a small pang of longing. She missed that kid. She was an unruly and disobedient child, but hey. Wasn't that just a Blackthorn thing?

Finley grimaced as Wraen tore her paw away from the ice. She seemed to be in perfectly good spirits about wounding herself, though. An odd lady indeed. "Uh.. Grats on your escape," she said before trying to turn the conversation (and her eyes) away, "So you're Dante's kid then?"

"You know... knew my dad?" it was Wraen's turn to be surprised, because she had not met anyone up until today, who had met her parents in person. Lasher's children were gone and so was her first home Donnelaith. And Charon, who, in fact, had had encountered her father on more than one occasion, had never really spoken about him. 

"Or Elwood told you," the moment of wonder passed, when she realized that she had told Finley's mate her story and it was very likely that she had shared it with her.

She seemed honestly surprised to hear that Finley knew her father, which made her wonder. Was it really so unusual? Maybe. Wolves around here did seem to die young or just vanish into thin air. Fin thought of Peregrine and Fox who had also known Dante very well. They were gone now. Lasher too. Probably Blue Willow with him. God, she was old.

"I used to live with him when I first came to Teekon," Fin answered, "At Blacktail Deer Plateau. It was the first pack I joined here and your dad was beta at the time. As I recall, I almost got him trampled by a stag the first time we met." She smiled fondly at the memory. Dante had always been good for shenanigans. He'd never been exactly willing, but good-natured about it when it was over and it had all turned out okay.

Wraen probably should not have acted so surprised, because Finley was roughly the same age her parents. But the last she had seen Osprey and Dante had been during time, when they both had been in their prime, and this was the image she associated them with. In her memory they were way younger than the Blackthorn matron now. 

"Oh, wow," Wraen chuckled feeling a bit awkward, because her first encounter with Liffey had ended with them almost dying in the paws of angry cougar and Terance getting a considerable amount of flesh torn out of his shoulder. "Did you do other crazy stuff?" she asked then, hoping that there would be some other story in Finley's stash that would out-trump almost death by an infuriated big cat.

"HA! Fin burst out with a single, solitary ha at the question asked. Did she do other crazy stuff? Finley Blackthorn was a damn legend at doing other crazy stuff. Dante was neither the first nor the last wolf she'd nearly gotten killed with her shenanigans. Hopefully by now, someone in the world had been the last, but I can't make any promises. She had a couple of good years ahead of her still.

"Sorry, that's just the best question I've ever been asked. Can't wait to tell my mate," she apologized with a grin, "But uh, I would say the answer to that is yes. Most definitely. Though, to be fair, crazy is in the eye of the beholder, so for all I know I've just done a ton of super average things." Elwood and Colt were both somewhere side-eyeing the living hell out of her, Peregrine and Fox were gaping at her in their graves, and pairs of eyes on faces all across the world were rolling with exasparation. A damn legend (in her own mind, anyway).

Wraen had met all kinds of people during her two year long stay at Teekons. Charon, who was proud to be... well... Charon. Terance, who by the age of three sported more ghastly scars than any other wolf she had met. He probably did not boast out loud, but he must have had some sort of pride for this kind of accomplishment. There were people, who were proud to be at, what they considered, the best pack in the world. And all other kinds of ordinary proud. 

Finley was the first, who took pride in being absolutely crazy (sorry, Epic, you have 6 years to catch up with Fin), and Wraen chuckled, regarding the old lady with amused gaze. "So, what are the pretty ordinary things by Blackthorn standards you have done?" she asked for more information on the topic. She had no doubt that it was... no... it had to be legen-wait-for-it-DARY! Legendary!

Fin smiled and settled in for storytime. She always enjoyed telling her stories. She had so many of them and she usually had to feel slightly guilty about telling them because her audience usually consisted of her children who did NOT need help getting ideas in their heads. They were clever enough to make trouble on their own, which they totally got from Elwood btw. But don't tell him I said that.

"Well back when I was yer age," she began, "Which, for the record, was not very long ago. I'm very young. You just can't tell because the scars on my face cover up my youth. But I digress. Before I became a mom, my pastimes usually included taunting bears, jumping off of cliffs and playing chicken with stampeding buffalo, among other things. Anything that got the blood pumping, I was all in." She paused to sigh a bit wistfully as the memories ran through her head. Her glory days.

"Mom used to say that age was just a number, what truly matters is, how young your soul feels," Wraen offered, still smiling. She still considered Finley old, but then again she would not be surprised at all to see this vixen taunting bears and pulling dragons by their tails. The only thing she wished was to retain the youthful appreciation of life Finley had, when she turned seven. 

"I have a legend before me, whose existence I did not know of up until today. I have a feeling that my life has been pretty impoverished without me even knowing that," she praised her. "Do tell more. Jumping off cliffs - how did exactly that work out? I lived in the mountains for a while and all great views and everything aside, I never had courage to dive from a ledge."

Finley smiled, even though it irked her a little that Wraen knew nothing about her. Dante sure as hell knew all about her. Why the crap hadn't he shared stories of her greatness with his kids? And Peregrine's sister, hadn't she been some kind of storyteller? What stories were better than Fin's?

She kept those thoughts to herself though, choosing to instead focus on getting to enjoy telling her own story. "Well, the trick with successfully jumping off of cliffs is knowing what's at the bottom. Or, at least being fairly certain of what you think is at the bottom. When your Aunt Fox first joined us at the Plateau, I took her up into the Sunspire mountains where I'd found this deep hole in the rocks. It looked like it went on forever into blackness, but I could hear the water rushing at the bottom, so I took her up there and we dove in. It was wild."

She shook her head fondly at the memory, feeling a pang in her heart. She missed her crazy friend. Fin had known from the moment Fox agreed to the venture that they would be BFFs for the rest of their days. If only hers hadn't been so short.

Wraen did not really know, how to react to this story - feel amazed, be terrified or seriously doubt Finley's saneness of mind. Because as far as cliff-diving went, she was even surer now that this was something she would never, ever attempt to do. She was afraid of heights, even though the six month stay first with Moonspear and then Sunspire had somewhat accustomed her to it. But the fear of falling had never gone away.

However, despite her skeptical view on this matter, she decided to show respect to the elderly adventurer as well as the required awe and surprise. "Sounds... dangerous," she said and added with a cheeky smile, "but that word does not mean the same to Blackthorns, does it? How did you end up playing chicken with stampeding buffalo?" She had an inkling that this had not happened by accident either.

Fin gave a nonchalant shrug as Wraen spoke of the danger of her shenanigans. In retrospect, they were rather dangerous and extremely stupid. And in retrospect, she had been completely aware of both of those facts. As a child, she had thought of her family as dull and overly crowded. She’s thought herself and Colt to be the exception to that rule, but the more of her family that popped into the Wilds, the more she began to think that maybe all Blackthorns actually we’re crazy — just she and her brother had been the first to act on it.

”Okay well the buffalo started it, first off,” Fin explained in a tone that rather alluded to the remainder of the tale, ”And if you ever ask the story of my brother @Colt, don’t listen to a word out of his damn fool mouth ‘cause he’ll try to tell you otherwise. I was just hanging out, grabbing a drink of water at a little stream nearby where he herd was hanging and this big ass bitch starts stamping and honking at me like I’ve just insulted it’s mother. She started it. And Colt did not have to get involved. That was on him.”

And one day I hope to read how Starr tells this story from Colt’s perspective :D

"Alright," Wraen nodded, though it was hard to suppress laughter and keep a straight face, while Finley told the premise of, what was going to be another great adventure. Juicy expressions and vivid imagery - she loved the lady's style right away and knew that she would press her for more tales, whenever the opportunity would present itself.

"Okay, and what happened then? The buffalo is stamping and honking, and you are there by the water," Wraen repeated the key facts to memorize them properly. "And, where was Colt?"

Wraen seemed quite taken with this story, which was a nice ego-stroke for the Blackthorn. She did have a lot of really great stories in her from her younger years. Talking about them made her a bit wistful for her glory days, but she still appreciated the opportunity to take a trip down memory lane.

"Well, I was all about just ignoring the buffalo's little temper tantrum, so that's exactly what I was doing," Fin continued, "Thing about big herd animals is they're all show and bluster. Ignore 'em and they'll go away. Hell, run at them and there's a good chance they'll run away too. But anyway, I went with the ignore tactic and the buffalo was just deciding to chill the fuck out and bounce when Colt comes flying in out of flippin' no where and goes charging the damn thing. As you can imagine, that was a bit distressing for the girl, so she charged right back. Next thing I know, I'm running in alongside Colt to try and keep him from getting his ass trampled and BAM!!"

She gave a pause after the shout before clarifying, "We were playing chicken with a buffalo."

"Unbelievable! Why did he do such a thing - did he try to play a hero?" Wraen muttered, her expression flabbergasted. She did not doubt that Finley was telling the truth, except she had hard time putting together the image of Colt, who had infuriated a buffalo on purpose, with that middle-aged man, who looked - alright - if not prim and proper, then experienced and clever. Perhaps, in his earlier years he had not been so. Finley might have been different from, what she seemed to be now, as well.

"How did that end?" she asked. "It's clear that both of you made out alive to tell the story, but those buffaloes can be very fast and very deadly, if they want to."

Fin shrugged, unable to actually provide an explanation as to why Colt did what he did. He'd said afterwards that it was to "save her ass", but seeing as her ass had only been in danger because of him, it hadn't really stood. The other question, she could answer.

"Oh, we won the game," Fin said nonchalantly, "Buffalo can indeed be fast and deadly, but they can also get tired, and they can get overwhelmed with more than one predator going at it at the same time. It eventually caught on that we were just fucking with it, so it stopped trying to run us off as though its life depended on it. It tried to run us off as though we were just super annoying, which is far less dangerous. But also less fun, so we eventually bailed."

"That's amazing," Wraen said and was about to pry for more awesome stories from Finley's life, when she heard an urgent call from her sister. Maia seemed too far away to just be called and come here, which meant that Wraen would have to go and find her herself.

"I have to go and see, what has happened," she told Finley apologetically. "But I would love to hear more of your stories. It would be great to hear them all and have them as a base for the legendary history Firebirds are going to have," she added.

"See you around!" she told the elder and took off as fast as her injured feet could take her.

Clearing my threadlog and wrapping up older threads. Thank you and I will love to have them meet each other again!