Dawnlark Plains wanted: big bad wolf

Spring had sprung, but Dawnlark Plains said absolutely not to the conventions of the season and remained barren as ever. The sun was high in the sky when Sam entered from the north, stopping to survey the long stretch of rocks and nothing ahead of him.

It was the perfect place for a meet cute between an evil mastermind and a willing number two.  He - or she, Sam was very progressive - would stand on an outcropping of rock somewhere, wind biting dramatically at their fur as they pondered their Sordid Past or Next Evil Deed. Sam would sidle up next to them, they would engage in some communal staring, and at the perfect moment the villain would say something like come, Samsidianibbidies (not his name but open to changing it for the right baddie) and a beautiful bond would be forged. They would never speak of it, and simply exist as though they had spawned together on that field one day in the spring.

Or something like that. Most stories didn't go into detail about how the henchmen came to.. hench.

Sam raised his nose to the wind and found the scent of wolf waiting there. If it wasn’t his future boss, he could at least ask for directions to the nearest evil lair.

There was no doubt anymore. She was lost.

Nayavanti had not come for her, nor her brother's. How could they leave her to suffer like this? Were they not searching?

It must have been god's will for her to still be alive, as hungry as she was. Stumbling upon a plain she recognized that another was present, her empty stare and large ears pointed towards them.

Maybe she was not the clear evil he was in search of, but she was here.

Instead of a boss on a rock, Sam found a ghost.  A tiny slip of a thing that had looked like a patch of stubborn snow at first, but was now staring at him with big, cloudy eyes. She must have haunted the place for so long that her body had started to take fashion tips from the landscape.

What a painfully dull place to spend your afterlife, Sam thought, and decided to say so. "I'm sorry you didn't die somewhere more exciting." Did she spend her time saying 'boo' to voles? What was the point? Those guys were fearless.

"Did you need like.. help? Moving on?" Sam asked, taking a few tentative steps toward the apparition. It surprised him a little that he was taking the whole 'ghosts are real' thing so well. It just... didn’t seem that crazy. That a soul with shit left to do would linger after death had called it home. 100% completion or nah.

There was no doubt in her mind that this man was too stupid to be one of her's - unless she really did look like that much of a ghost. How would she know, anyways?

But she knew that sometimes stupid could be good. Stupid could be teased and molded. So long as it had eyes better than her own, stupid could take her back to the island - or at least close enough that she would be found.

Making her own approach based on the sound of footsteps and the scent of man, she looked for her nose to meet strange fur. Maybe once he realized she was solid he would know she was no ghost. Though he wasn't completely wrong she supposed - in a sense she did need help moving on.

She didn't say anything. Very ghostly behavior. Instead, she walked slowly towards him, nose working hard to conpensate for what Sam understood to be unseeing she. She looked supremely creepy, and Sam was full on grimacing and leaning away when her wet little nose hit the side of his chest.

"H-hiiiii, little guy. Gal," Sam managed to say through clenched teeth. Being corporeal did not mean that she was not supernatural; unfortunately, Sam's knowledge of the the spooky was limited. It had never been his genre.

He glanced down. Her ears were weird.
Too large and very pointy, like the owl that had terrorized his sister in their youth. 

"Are you lost, maybe...?" he asked, inching away from her touch. Maybe whatever was going on with her whole situation was contagious.

Geez, what was his deal talking to her like she was a pup? Though she did suppose that she was pretty small.

It then occured to her that she would have to.. vocalize to this stranger. That meant breaking a rule. But then again, was she really breaking any rules if Blackwater was her cult pack now? There was no way of him knowing that she needed to go to the coast otherwise; she had lost track of which way it was, and she could not smell the salt from here.

She would have to try. However she found that upon opening her mouth to speak, what came out was a stuttered mess of cuh-cuh-cuh and oasttt Not at all helping her case, sounding so much like gh-gh-gh-ghooosttt. Her ears perked at the sound of her own voice, almost as if she was surprised. She was so well spoken with Nayavanti and her brothers, why was a stranger so difficult to speak to?

She had half a mind to simply yell 'take me to the coast, stupid!' But she was much too demure, much too mindful.

Oh, wow. If she wasn't a ghost, then she had recently been fashioned from mud by a wizarding lunatic who had breathed life into her and disappeared in the same moment.

Miraculously, Sam understood the word 'coast'. He groaned inwardly. The guidebook to villainy told him to leave her, but every fibre of his being screamed at him to help.

"Fine, fine," he said, looking around. Having functioning eyes was of absolutely no help; no direction screamed coast more than another. "Did you come from there, or...? I don’t know where 'coast' is." Not to mention that it would be a huge and annoying detour. Perhaps whoever had let her wander did not want her back. She was clearly helpless. The kind thing would be to walk her off a cliff.

So, he didn't know the area. Not a big deal, he was still a bag of fur to drag along should she be able to hold him.

With what seemed a grumble, she lifted her nose to check for the scent of salt once more. Still nothing, so she would have to take her best guess. Harshly jutting his shoulder with her muzzle, her paws began to take her north-west.

If she was lucky, Nayavanti would find her when she got far enough north, or maybe even that strange 'ghost talker' who she had loved to tease.

She poked him in the shoulder, hard. The little seed of irritation in the back of Sam's skull began to sprout and there was a sudden, brief bloom of heat behind his eyes. Still, he followed her, occasionally warning of an upcoming boulder or a particularly dense tussock of hardy grass doing it's best to live a full life in a teaspoon of good soil.

"You can talk," Sam said after they had walked for what felt like a thousand years. He was bored, and his mood had been on the fast train to Bitch City since she pushed him. "At least tell me why we're going to 'coast'."

ooc: I fast-forwarded time a bit; you can absolutely undo it if you had other plans.

She thought she was starting to smell salt on the air every so often. They must be going the right way.

It was hard not to be grateful for the pushes away from danger - even if he was not Nayavanti. He did inevitably speak up, Visala pausing momentarily. Blackwater. The word slipped from her tongue much easier than her first attempt to speak to him. I am their prophet.

She still felt a pit deep in her stomach as she spoke. But nonetheless, speaking had gotten her back to where she needed to be.

Sam scoffed. Not at Blackwater — which was a perfectly serviceable, slightly unimaginative name for a deep body of water — but at the word prophet.

He knew what one was. Prophets foretold things, and, in every story of his childhood where one had featured, the seemed to have a rather high opinion of themselves. Sam's opinion was that they had all smacked their head on a rock when they fell out of their mother.

He could have left it at that, but he was getting hungry, and they were heading in the opposite direction to the one he had bet all of his wolf bucks. So, just to be petty, he said, "No, you aren't. That's not a thing. They’re just being nice to you because you're useless." Petty snowballed quickly into cruel.

She raised an eyebrow at his words. Nobody had ever outright denied her. That was what I was raised to believe. She said. What makes you think it isn't real?

Whether he was being cruel or not, she was genuinely interested. Not much could be done to really hurt Visala's feelings, anyways.

She had always assumed that everyone believed in a god of sorts, her parents told her that theirs was simply the only true one. The rest were sent as tests to mislead you. Visala was never quite sure of what was true, for she was not one to question those who had raised her.

His words for not have the desired effect - for Visala, it seemed, was posessed of pretty solid self-esteem. The quirk of her brow took the wind right out of Sam's sails.

"Well.. you.." the non-believer spluttered, dropping back a little. He had not been prepared for questions. His tone was derisive when he spoke from her flank. "What, do you dream about.. about storms and famine? Throw bones in the air and eat gross bugs?" The local witchwoman had done all of these things, and everything about her and her squalid den gave Sam the ick.

Hearing him at her flank, she lifted her tail to flick the tip of his nose - once she found it anyways. She hoped it left him reasonably annoyed nonetheless.

No - that would just be strange. What sort of wolf eats bugs? Despite her nose wrinkling her smile remained. What a strange man this one was. She had never heard of wolves eating bugs or throwing bones, and how could she dream of things she had never seen?

Her tail danced in front of his face, searching, and eventually whipped Sam hard in his wide open eye. 10 points to Slytherin, who had been assuming for 5.

"What do you do then?" Sam grumbled, stooping to rub at his eye. When he drew level again, there was a smile - evil grin? - on Visala's weird little face. The two spots of color above her eyes made every expression look like it's conniving sibling. She gave Sam an unsettled feeling in his stomach.

I listen. She responded rather simply. There was not much more to it than that; she listened for signs delievered to her, and then voiced them to her Keeper and Speakers. That was the way it was meant to be. My lack of sight makes me the ideal for the role. The fact that I walk freely with only the pain of hunger proves that I am meant for something more.

She often found herself repeating her parent's words these days, as though she needed to convince herself of her purpose.

You ask a lot of questions.

heard voices. Sam's grandmother had tended towards a similar flavor of delulu towards the end of her life, but she had been pudhing 8 years old. And 9 times out if 10, the voices she heard had come from Sam and his cousins hiding in the undergrowth.

"Well what do they say?" Sam needled. She parroted something that a loved one had likely said to spare her feelings, and declared that he asked a lot of questions. The grey boy huffed. "Only because YOU never really answer. You're a weird blind wolf that hears voices and you don't want to think too hard about how crazy you sound."

Despite all that, he still nudged her gently around an upcoming boulder. "Where are your friends?" he asked, then added, "Yeah, yeah, another question." She was alive – hungry, sure, but not so emaciated as to suggest that her friends were imaginary.  He needed to hand her off to whoever these weirdos were and get moving on the right direction again.

She didn't respond to his initial question. Hearing voices wasn't her style, but she would let him think it was.

Grateful for his guide, she made it easy as they moved about. They couldn't be far now. They'll come. I'll call for them and when the tide is low they'll come to take me home. She hoped so, anyways. You can just leave me here.

..Thank you. The words were said with some hesitation, but she thought she should be polite. He had guided her the whole way here after all.

Visala skirted the question. As predicted, Sam took this as confirmation that she did indeed walk around with a plague of voices in hear head. He felt a little guilty when she thanked him.  He hadn't been nice to her, and she couldn't help that she was weird and blind. At least not the blind part.

"Sure," Sam mumbled awkwardly, then, "I guess.. see you around. Don't die." He found that he meant it.

Distracted, the young wolf lumbered off in the wrong direction, and would himself eventually end up on the coast - for the very first time, without knowing the word for salty water or the loose, gritty soil that bordered it. He would often stop to look back, even after she had become entirely obscured by foliage and distance.