Duskfire Glacier save your advice cuz i won't hear

hoping for @Malachi :)
Sorry it's short :p

the heart wants what it wants - Selena Gomez

[size=large]"lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones"[/size]

[size=small]
Winter brought cold, Autumn brought colorful leaves and bugs brought utter disgust to the young Sveijarn.
At the young age of seven months Maera already though she knew it all; that life could no longer through surprises. Thinking that she knew what tricks lied under life's sleeve was not only incredibly wrong but also dangerous. But of course, the obnoxious. Ind if a teenager was not ready to comprehend that, instead it adhered to the illogical logic that every feeling that life had to offer she had already wasted.
With grief and loneliness as her unconditional companions, laziness and vanity weighing on her and an endless hunger for the best, nothing seemed to impress the young fire child.

But,oh, little did the girl know that it was exactly in those moments of clarity that life decided to fog the your sight and spin you over.
While Maera was a passionate hoarder, life was just a bitch.
With her tail curled possessively over her back, the young mini-Tuwawi fanned over the vast expanse of the Glacier, her route undefined but her steps confident.
That until -- the familiar, yet intriguing, scent of another reached her nostrils.
Soon the female found herself following the trail of, not only another member of the Glacier, but the Alpha himself..
Despite her long time at the Glacier (in her mind since birth) she had never bothered to seek out the man, and surprisingly he hadn't either.
Today, however, that was no more.
The cat and mouse game would end today.




[/size]

It's all good! My eyes are a bit bleary, so apologies for run on sentences. It's about time these two met for real (:

How he'd gone so long without encountering Maera was beyond him: in all honesty, he should have at least seen her around. But the girl proved more elusive than the sun on a rainy day, and truth be told, Malachi didn't have such a great track record himself. He'd found her trail countless times, but had managed to convince himself again and again that she was busy, or that she had someone else to keep her company, or that she didn't really need him barging his meddlesome nose into her quiet life.

But all these excuses simply covered the nerve he held inside, because if he told the honest truth, he didn't think she was busy, and he didn't think she had many friends to keep her company. Before Scarlett had arrived, she'd had Danica and Arabella, but they were both long gone, and their scents remained only as a distant memory lost to the sappy scent of pines and to the overshadowing aroma of the wolves who had come to fill their ranks. Whether or not she needed him was another question, but he'd never been a part of her life, save for being a constant presence at the Glacier since their arrival. In her own grief he imagined she'd sought solace with the pack's older women, or with her father. When one caretaker left, another came, and so it went. She had never come to him, and so he assumed she didn't need him, and life was easier that way, because he didn't know what he would do if she did.

Yet when he passed her trailing scent that day, the thought came again - the one that had been relentless in its presence, always nagging the back of his mind that it was time to just go and find Maera and meet the remainder of the Sveijarn brood, the child of the parents he'd been working to preserve the pack for day in and day out. He'd tried before, but Tuwawi had intercepted him and he'd used her appearance as an excuse to stop his search. But as he lingered at her scent that day, no Tuwawi appeared, and no excuse cropped up to make him turn away. So with reluctant resolve, he lowered his head to pick up her trail and followed, swallowing the uncertainty that came with his advance, and spinning him into circular rhythm with the girl who tracked his own.

[size=large]"lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones"[/size]

[size=small]Soon the flaming female began to fall into what could only be described as a complex dance of come and go. As the prowling girl tried to pin point the male, she was unknowingly stretching her trail out for him in endless circles. Like Malachi's view on the pack's Caretakers, they were inevitably caught in a dreadful cycle of come and go. Thankfully, however, the badly drawn caricature of the two chasing each others tail was cut short by the impatience in the young female's heart.
While it had been her who had taken the decision to end the cat and mouse game, it was also now her who resigned to it all first.

Once more she allowed the trademark laziness of her childhood come into the light. Slowing to a halt the remaining Sveijarn child flared her nostrils one last time, tasting Malachi's fragrance one last time before turning her attention to the horizon.
With the same malleable nature she had accepted the numerous babysitters that had come and gone, Maera changed back into the suit of mouse.
If she was ever to encounter Malachi, it would now be solely because of his efforts. [/SIZE]

He could have sworn he'd passed that tree already, and that confused bush with the berries trying to bloom out of season. Malachi frowned, but continued forward, yet it didn't take rocket science to tell him he was walking in circles, nor did it take expert deduction to determine Maera was walking in circles too - and in the same shape his own paws drew.

So Malachi slowed his steps until he came to stop and, with his brows clearly furrowed against the dilemma he now faced, turned to face the direction from which he'd came, as if expecting to see the shape of Maera cresting through the wooded trunks. He waited a minute, but she never came, and doubting she ever would he took to walking again, tracing Maera's trail backward and retracing the steps he'd taken to find her in the first place. He could have easily given up, but that she was seeking him, too, made him pace all the more determined toward her. He didn't let his thoughts wander to what he would do when he came upon her, trusting he'd know in the moment - if he even recognized her at all.

[size=large]"lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones"[/size]

[size=small]Aside from the perpetual scowl and the gangly legs that supported her adolescent body with something far from grace, Maera was not that irrecognizable. Though the face of the man was not exactly engraved into her memory either, it was predictable that if she were to see him from afar she would know who he was. Despite the professional level on which they had taken their cat and mouse game, they knew what the other looked like, right?Unless Maera's sensation of being invisible after the Sveijarn monarchy's downfall had been true there was no reason for her to be completely foreign to him.

Soon the female fell into motion again, unknowingly pulling herself towards the male. While the desires of seeking him out the corners of the Glacier had faded away from her mind she would soon meet him halfway -- something that was perhaps was meant to be their only solution.
Finally, neither of them would be the cat nor the mouse.

The figure of another moving silhouette played along her side, making the girl lift her eyes from the floor and onto the man. At first he recieved nothing. No reaction or emotion could be read in her posture; while she was properly showing submission to the young Alpha male, she kept her eyes poised on his face.
Ambiguity flooding her expression like the flames that covered her body.
[/SIZE]

As seconds slunk into minutes, Malachi wondered if he had passed her by, until a flicker of red caught his attention and he lighted his eyes upon her. And at the sight of her, Malachi froze and his tongue ran dry, and silence consumed them both. He couldn't read her, he couldn't read her if he tried, for she showed him nothing. Submission, sure, but as for her face, she wrote him a message as clear as the muddy stains of the Glacier ice.

Not so for the message he sent. As quick as his gaze fell upon her did he feel his eyes cloud with uncertainty, questioning if they would consider this enough and pass by without a word, until another day drew them to this fate again and wove a new cycle for the cat and mouse to walk into. Always seeing, but never speaking. His ears turned to the side, and his mind fell blank, and for a heartbeat he merely shared her stare.

But finally he forced his throat to rumble with the simplest word he could muster, yet even that was stiff with hesitance. "Maera." He gave, and offered her a shallow dip of his head. He returned his gaze upon her, and simply waited to see how she would take him now. One thing he knew for fact: no longer was she the pup he'd leaned in to carry on the long journey to Duskfire.

[size=large]"lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones"[/size]

[size=small]Silently, she too considered passing by without a word. What was cordiality to a pair of strangers that shared the same home? Wasn't the fleeting seconds during which their eyes met enough?
No, they were not.
And she knew it.
She remained still, motionless, like a statue of a younger version of her mother, from whom she had inherited the flaming spirit and fierce stubbornness."Hi"she barked, failing to return her greeting with the same formality.

Despite they contact they had probably shared during the initial journey to the Glacier, all memories that might have been created then were inexistent in the girl's mind. Aside from the exhaustion and the game of follow the leader Jokull had told her to play she didn't remember anything else. She didn't remember him, and honestly she didn't remember herself.
Malachi was right, the small helpless kid she had been, was now gone.
Whether it was with the lynx or with her siblings would remain unknown.

Now, even if she remained almost as whiny, she had traded her laziness for self-indulgence and a growing sense of vanity. "..." she hummed silently, her mouth and body too full of herself but her mind still hungry for whatever would be his response.
[/SIZE]

She held him in a pregnant pause - and then left him there in labour. Her quiet humming drummed through him, and he found little idea how to take her. A thought occurred that maybe this was it, that maybe this was Maera, or just who she had become in the aftermath. He felt a flutter of apprehension, and a disconcerting nudge to leave, but at the after a beat let his own resolve harden. He hadn't come all this way just to turn around and give up. That wasn't the Kalderon's way, and it wasn't his own.

"So..." he started, and was quick to find near suitable words, "It's good to officially meet you." He tried to grin, but his face faltered and his words came stiff and stilted, for he did not know if this meeting would be considered good. Time would shortly tell, and until proven wrong, the man was willing to give their encounter the benefit of a doubt. After all, if Scarlett could connect with the girl, why couldn't he?

@Malachi (psst we need at least 1 moar posttttt)

"lights will guide you home, and ignite your bones"

[size=small]While silence was something the aspiring Naturalist-Warrior was used to, and quite honestly was also fond of, this one in particular was uncomfortable and strange. Unbearable really. And she suspected it was not only like this for her. With her nose wriggling in feign indifference towards the awkwardness that had settled upon them she tried to plan an excuse to leave.
But what could she say really without risking the guy building a grudge towards her?
That she was sick? That she was going hunting -- what if he waned to come?
What if he wanted to play the dreaded role of Counselor and try to fish out answers from her deeply hidden pit of bottled feelings?
Did he really think he could be a ghost and then become real all of a sudden?

Before any of these questions could recieve an answer, or more could be made he spoke; his voice cutting brusquely through the silence and reaching her ears with a certain dubiety hanging on them. "Yeah, officially" she echoed, suddenly wondering how could it have been possible for them to live under the same sky and never walk the same roads until today.

"..And now we can officially stop ignoring each other's existence I guess" she barked a bit more softly, her eyes fleeting from his face to the ground and then back again.[/SIZE]