Two Rivers Isle in sickness & in health

for Magpie de l'encrier

Everything was bleary, fogged over by a blankness like the world was but white and green. He tracked a shade in the corner of his eye, a division between two shades that waxed and waned. It almost felt like his shivering was matching pace with his heart, both languid things that sought not to leave him unmoved. He wasn't sure he felt cold, awash instead with the persistent twinge of his turmoils.

He didn't lift his head as the shape grew nearer, just lying in wait with labored breaths. He felt drier than before, Cormorant noted belatedly, no snow stained his legs bitterly damp. He was lying in soil and roots - he couldn't really tell if it was a den or some hollowed end of a trunk - he didn't really care.

His shoulders shook, a motion that chased up and down his spine, wringing a mournful whine out of him. He was still exhausted, all he wanted was sleep, but the sensations of his blood pulsing through tender patches and the creaking of his own breath refused to let him slip.

Though his heart lacked the pitiful squeeze of grief, Magpie's gaze stayed fixated, sorrowfully panning over Cormorant's trembling form in the darkened hollow. There was almost something to admire in the sight, a view so vaguely poetic it was lost to even him. He hesitantly stepped closer, ditching the mangled carcass he'd brought in favor of evaluating his state. Breathing, but not living. A shuddering corpse.

His muzzle came down beside Cormorant's head, pressing an affectionate nose to the wolf's temple. He was at least pleased to see the makeshift den was doing it's job, keeping the other dry to some extent, though it could always be better. He could always do better. Are you cold? Magpie whispered softly against the other's cheek, just gently enough to seem like he may have genuinely cared. Of course, he knew the answer would be yes, or any other garbled variant of it, so long as Cormorant let go of his pride. 

There wasn't a sliver of fight to be found in rolling blue eyes as they drifted up to the dark shape — his ears swiveling to the sound of the low voice accompanied by its presence. It was more that than anything that shocked the tiniest bit of consciousness into his mind. Magpie. That much he could recognize. Even yet still, the quiet warmth of a voice so often jeering or lying, warped into something comforting in a sea of despondency. 

Still yet, a reply of words did not follow, instead just a pitiful whine. 
Still yet, a form of agreement, it felt like the cold plagued him down to the tips of his nails.

The warmth of the other's breath was enough to make him tip his head toward the other, as if it'd be enough to convince Magpie to become a wolfish blanket. Instead, the warped sound of a howl bounced down through the woods toward them, some stranger beckoning.

He didn't process it until he had been roughly scruffed, shuffled up and pushed - a pained exhale slipping between the gasp of his jaws, trudging with all the grace of a fawn too quickly plucked from the grass. His stomach flipped, but they were moving, away, away, away and he didn't want to know why. For once, the anxiety curdling his stomach wasn't stoked by Magpie, even as warm whispers coaxed him onward, but the thought of someone else, seeing him like this. A confused, mangled thing. 

magpie relocates cormorant from the two rivers isle — leaving any hint of their presence a fading trail on a blessedly frozen stretch of river.