[open] One foot toward the gallows || Diplomats, Any ||

[Wolfbane]

My dreams have all come true

In flying overhead with Titus, Wolfbane has formulated everything he needs in order to try and move ahead with his kingdom and his mercenaries. These moments of lull in the plague, along with the expansion of their known world, leaves him ample time to be decisive while it seems the rest of the once-great kingdoms are busy hammering out their own problems. He doesn’t want to be caught unawares in the coming months and he knows that soon enough, new borders will be solidified and new rulers crowned. There’s the possibility of some old kingdoms being knocked off the leaderboards, but his desire (and his eternal drive) is to ensure that Loess won’t become one of the fallen.

So he doesn’t waste any time when the sun begins to peek above Brilliant Pampas flower-strewn hills, only stretches his great wings and offers a tender goodbye to his family before working out stiff joints and leaping into a cloudy sky for the flight north. Midday comes as he breezes through Loess, the clouds gathering in thick, gray clumps before the sound of booming drums crashes in fair warning of a spring storm. Foul weather put a dampener in the pegasus’ design to speedily fly, forcing him to push up through the darkening thunderheads and make an estimated flight until he could drop lower again.

He’s in luck it would seem, because when he breaks through the last layers of filmy mist there’s Taiga stretching out in endless rows of hunched, spiny redwood caps beneath him. The massive trees are gathered close to one another like soldiers, taking the brunt of an evening downpour which had begun to soak Wolfbane through to the bone. High time I landed, he thought as he circled lower, finding a bare plot of land where great, stony humps rose out of the ground. Lightning arched above, flashing through the heavy drops and cracking open the heavens the moment his blue hooves settled on the ground again. From where he stood and peered through the mass of trees, water streaming across his face and soaking his closing feathers, Wolfbane was certain he could spy a set of reflective eyes glaring back.

“I come seeking diplomacy!” The exposed horse grunted, half-yelling to try and make himself known above the ensuing rumble of thunder. His ears were bent aside to keep water from clogging them up, but no hair fell across his vision so he kept both olive colored eyes trained in the direction of shadows and maze-like trunks. The rain fell relentlessly in curtains of icy, stinging beads but the oddly striped stallion refused to ingress any further into the unknown territory. He merely wound his way carefully down from the rocky perch and waited there, trying once again to grab someone’s attention by calling out, “Is Taiga claimed?”

Like all good nightmares do