Larksong Grotto prüfung

maybe @Astraeus? <3

on the east side of the peak was a forest swung around by layers of iced pathways that led downward. this climate suited mahler, though he remained aware of the dangers of rain upon melt. and so he was careful, not quite descending down to the woodland's floor, but rather observing it from above, focused as always for any sign of prey.
mahler hoped that peace would prevail. but first an earthquake had forced them from diaspora, and savages drove them from sagtannet. irritated, he let the sensation pass and explored the single track a goat had left.

The familiar tang of the cragsman roused Astraeus, skipping and toppling over year upon year old stems. The roughening of his pads was endemic along with his prosperity, tickled to show off his growing (yet, still squishy) muscles.

"what're you doing!" he squealed. Rolling at the speed of light his grips on the surface eluded him and crashed into his elder's hind, jumping up unfazed and scatterring between his legs once again. "what's that smell? what are you looking at? what are we doing? do you have food?"

it was not long before he was joined by boisterous, leggy astraeus. "hold on, hold on," the eisen grunted, chuckling at the boy's enthusiasm. "look." he directed the skarp's attention to the mark in the mud, sniffing it dramatically. "food made this, and if ve are lucky, ve vill eat him today." with that he set off, eyes hunting the trail of the goat in a meandering step along the side of the mountain. "vhat do you think of this place, astraeus?"

Pealing laughter ensued from Mahler, this seemingly the boy's métier. Astraeus drew back his lips — the dulcet presence of the peewee menace proves enjoyable company. Rescinding himself from fleet-footed thoughts, fixed ( perhaps momentary ) engrossment now on his tutor, as Mahler whiffed a peculiar depression in the trail.
— ah, so it is luck that proves when stalking! If they needed luck, his eisen should have sowed four-leaved clovers around the peak and wove low leguminous herbs in his coat. A clover-woven, braided-belly gargoyle. He titters; the cragsman not the wiser.

"vhat do you think of this place, astraeus?"​

The imp mulls on the question. Especially since the skarp is asked of nothing lest to cooperate. There was that beaten spirit he'd felt before at that solemn gathering, like an arid apartment party with no previously promised provisions. Spire-wolves therein carrying heavy hearts gainst' heaving breasts, nursing this sinking feeling. Shoo! Off off! he had scolded this infectious indisposition, this witcher spell! As an innocent youth he couldn't understand their wallowing;
he understood nothing most the time. Nothing but crawlies, flora, and fauna. 

His pace dallies. "i like id, i can see a bunch more tings," as if to prove this, Astraeus studies the prints again. "i never'd see hoof print before'd," he twinkles. "i never ate any-ting with a hoof before'd!" 

astraeus responded with a brash enthusiasm the gargoyle had not yet seen in the boy. enlivened by it, mahler offered a bold laugh. "vell then ve vill have to catch you something vith a hoof, yes." he led the star-child along the path he had found, loping in that careful trot that led them between thickening spruce into the underbelly of old boreal canopies.
here mahler sniffed at a white patch of lichen, indicating to the little hunter where the goat had left a tuft of tangled pale fur. onward and onward, until their byway cut directly up into the sharper cliffs. mahler pondered a moment, wondering if the boy was old enough to bring so high.
ultimately he did not wish to be astraeus' undoing, and so continued at a gentler incline, seeking a safer footing up the beginning slopes. "maybe, if ve are lucky, ve vill get to see a dragon."

The star-stag nods languidly as the stonewarden mouths along, lagging as he takes in the spruce spires; their diadems looming, brandishing in disorderly wafture. Their soughing, he thinks to himself, it's the exhale of nature. Their shoulders guarding unknown dwarf and mayhaps faeries, he nods to them in respects. It makes him proud to govern the drove of guardians.
he moves to voice his chances of ascent if he were to mount one of these perennial guardians when Mahler notions towards a vernal spit of white lichen ... no, tanglish fur. Kept abreast, Astraeus realizes Mahler's game is nigh. 

The apprentice had yet to see the art of the hunt;
innocence still dissuaded from cruel Mother Nature;
a small-time juvenile cowbird will learn firsthand her indisputable law.

The gargoyle treads after a ways away until their little road explodes into a clashing scene of twinning cliffs and inclines. The foothills roll beneath him, plummeting and wheeling till' they sage into perennial spires. Scatter! he realizes as Mahler is a bear's length ahead up a kind incline. For the first time, Astraeus learns what a climb up a mountain is rather than gingerly gliding down. His breast puffs the needle-cold air as he reaches to hug Mahler's back again. 

"maybe, if ve are lucky, ve vill get to see a dragon."

"nah! you're silly!" the star-child chirrs, "if a dwagon was here he'd been eatin' us! if i were a dragon i'd eat me too, i know i'd taste real good!" When Astraeus grows to be wise and weathered, in hindsight; he wouldn't blame the man if he had reproachful dread of him growing up to be wolf anthropophagite.

"oh, is that so?" mahler rumbled, craning his wide crown to snipe halfheartedly with gentle tooth-clicks against whatever part of astraeus could be reached. a teasing motion; he merely quickened his step, teasing a greater speed. "i suppose you are right," mahler conceded, stopping to investigate another quartet of hoof-prints.
he wondered if the boy ever thought of the woman who had borne him. she had simply disappeared one day. was she remembered in the halls of that little mind? and should mahler, one day, bring up the woman's name if just to give his adopted child a birthright? such ponderings were better left for another time.
"you are so confident a dragon vould eat you. vhat about me?" he joked, continuing to track the trajectory of the beast as he flicked an ear backward in perfect attentiveness to astraeus.

His eisen's jubilant tooth-clicks see to the boy's ear and crest,
love-some, boyish titters; a hymn to fatherly dearness. 
this familial love, storge, the ironmaw doles it every which way to all his babes, nevertheless, his bosom is ascertain he's particular, destined; it's being a child of surprise that allows the pupil to be all the more desirous for it; to feast from the hands that coddle him so — it should not be divvied with gluttonous bloodsuckers already bless'ed with their dams; cradling them in their woads!

These selfish, devilish sentiments must be locked away in his bosom forever, yes, as he cannot be put at the expense of the disappointed gaze of the cragsmen; nary
again. If he spits hits curses he'll be gone, left; nary
again. 
never never never just like her
The mild oath is taken upon a fearful grip.

The star-stag snaps out of his mentations only to groan as the pace quickens...tauntingly. Oh, so he thinks issa joke, imma show him a joke, he thinks coyly, bracing for another barrage of ear nips, "well i dunno, maybe they don't eat old people."

"oof, mein herz," mahler exclaimed with faux shock. he was in truth impressed with astraeus' wit. this time however, he did not go for the aud-ends of the boy; he only bunched his muscles and made a leap from one wide stone to the next.
the impact broke a low sound from his chest, but mahler only turned, gesturing the child up the slope after him. "in that case, you must be the quickest runner. i vill not be able to catch up vith you if a dragon chases us, for i am an old man."
low chortle; he meant to tease, and smiled warmly at the adopted pup before their path leveled to less of a climb and more of an overview toward the land sagtannet had inherited.

The argent draws his unfurling crown skybound, lolling that puckish tongue; implike, rascally!
Ah, but prompt hideaway, lest his eisen want of it. Good-natured  (and evenly bad)  wit, this unknowingly instilled trait, surely from neither of his maternal halves, mayhaps paternal? Need not question who this papa and what his clan may be; 
whereinsoever there is nonparelil nominee; already beside him —

A daint hop o'er these boulders does Astraeus suppose that he is what he is to his milk-kin, a:
"Dat's okay, Papa,"
therein born from a prudent pause, lashes unveil emerald bleeding to blue. He thinks not of what the spire-queen would feel of it, or what the honey-daubed slyph in turn, those quirkish lips chart a grin no short of verity and fervor;
"When I get real bigger, I can carry you!"

papa.
mahler allowed himself a small saccharine sampling of pure paternal pleasure. to be called father, and by a child not his own. it meant in some way that he had taken that role for astraeus. the gargoyle would never pretend that he was anything other to the child than what he had become. reared on wylla's milk did not a sibling make, as evinced by phaedra's disregard of the boy.
but mahler, perhaps weak in his heart and moreso than he ought to be, found this delightful. "i vould like to see that," he chuffed, parading along a promontory and spotting the goat not far away from the downwind pair.
"how large do you think you vill be, astraeus?"

Vater and sohn;
not thetered by blood-line and not the brother of his babes yet...even if the jewel of Wylla's eye allows that childish dislike to fester in her loins (not that he didn't do the same, if not moreso childish), both bitty sabres cherish the gargoyle, wanting to exhuast every bit of the minutes spent with the general.
—no, there are nothing like having one submerge you in fatherly affections, thankful he is not plagued by the fear of being lovelorn, no longer. Ah, but that is the manner of children.

Perhaps hunting is the best instance of manly bonding.

Reply to enquiry after a shallow pondering, "ummm...maybe as big as dat guy who bring me to phaedwa's home?" Melkor; winter's bane; the silver, but Astraeus never learnt the former eisen's name, the only concerns were of food and executing his bodily functions.

The farther they tread, the beast finds the star-stag's eyne as the pair come to standstill; a battle of the center? Lapis-emerald bore questioningly into lavender, wondering what is he to do? He'd only seen his eve banquets dead, never alive; pulsing; and eating as he. 

astraeus was suddenly quite attentive, and mahler suddenly quite distracted from his quarry. wintersbane. where had the man gone? mahler still believed it was the power of that season which drew the aloof northerner from his post. perhaps he had found the bonds of family beyond sagtannet too precious to leave.
for that, the gargoyle could not judge him — and he had never been angry with his former co-leader. the loss of stigmata had lodged in him, inspired such a reaction. "i suppose that is very possible." he had never known the boy's father, nor agana herself. pregnant one morning, delivered of a child the next, gone in the the last. not happy enough to remain; perhaps she grieved the elf. perhaps wintersbane did also. 
but she had left astraeus within sagtannet. he would thrive in the stones of his land even if agana had departed, and it had been so. the man focused upon the animal again, eyeing the path of his own trajectory. with a glance to the child, mahler was off, gathering speed beneath his powerful bulk as the beast saw him only in the last second, and stumbled its first step away.

short post!

Mahler parts from him with a wonted glance as he pursues the beast hotly, the braying of a cornered animal falls on swiveling ears as its own hooves that the boy had been so interested in betrayed it. I'm glad I don't have hooves, the boy reckons as he opts to follow the man so he doesn't have to scout for them later.

astraeus loped behind; mahler sensed it even as his attention knifed him sharply after the creature. so many years to him, and yet mahler felt his strength had not abated. not yet, he supposed, unknowing of that which was to pass.
upon the beast after its first failure, one summarily the last, mahler locked his jaws around the side of the wooled throat, shaking the ruminant viciously as he tore for the great arteries.
a cloven hoof flung up, and then another; the last caught him a glancing blow to the flan, blunted by the thickness of the winterpelt he had begun to grow. a grunt, but the wolf only intensified the clench of his teeth, setting the pillared strength of his legs and refusing mercy.

Mahler wrest the woolen throat of the beast;
(if the boy was an educated scholar, he'd compare and contrast the hart and the hunter). Astraeus chews the side of his cheek as the goat parries, but his elder endures, o' so lionheartedly. Crescent-lune teeth uncover a spring of bloom'd red, bitter wine, the musk permeating in the vicinity;
a lost-lustrous glimpse of the to-be-felled beast blanches, pallid and waning orbs entranced in his. The goat breathes a final damning on wolves as it's limbs feather back themselves, sighing into fathomless repose. The boy knew it was a death that was necessary for them to live, and so he stares, unbemused.

“Papa, you did it!”

there the word for father again, and mahler looked with love patterning the grooves of his heart toward astraeus. the loss of thade would be a wedge-parted wound him forevermore, but the star-son had reminded the gargoyle of what it meant to be father anew.
"and you vill do the same vone day, astraeus," came the chuff of the shadowpriest. bloodied, tension ebbing, he invited the boy closer to dine with him. he would summarily return the remainder to caches, but for now mahler felt existent in this moment, felling a kill in preparation for his son's ascent to hunter.

ty for this thread! i adore their dynamic! ♥ one more post and then we can archive?

Astraeus accepts his father's cordial invitation for evening repast, snaking between the eisen's legs so he may adjust for a warm breastseat. Riving the gooseflesh of a past petrified ungulate from its belly, Mahler's star-son poses an enquiry, “Can you teach me waht 'mein herz' means? And...da udder t'ings too?” the rascally cowbird flushes, the agent being his shy request and so he pipes up, “Like! Like how do you say..um..'I love you, papa' in gibberish!”
it was achingly obvious Astraeus hadn't a clue what German was, but he found it 'neat' all the same.

this was great! <3 i love them, and tysm :D

"'my heart,"' mahler muttered automatically, thinking of the mothertongue he shared with his daughters. some hesitance in him, but why should the astral fawnling not know his own words? he spoke it to everyone, wherever he might; mahler would even have taught it to wylla had she been receptive to the knowledge.
"not gibberish," he chuckled, lipping another strip of flesh from the downed animal. "german." and thus he began their belated lessons, bringing astraeus home only when a wide swathe of time had passed and they had both been sated upon the kill.
ich liebe dich, papa.