when i run through the deep dark forest long after this has begun,
She’s restless. Perhaps then it is the warmer weather that draws her to the east. She had contemplated first heading west - home, to Tephra, where she had been so loved as a young pup by her wolf-father and lion-mother. Her time in the smoke-swathed territory was filled with tender memories, but now grown, she could not bring herself to return to a place where no one would be waiting for her. She searches for that familiarity, yet in the same instance, runs from it.
She is all wolf; all claw and fang and pure ferocity. She always has been. The forest of Beqanna is full of her presence, from her lonesome and sorrowful howls at twilight, to the bones picked clean beneath damp underbrush.
The winter had been good to her, fortunately. Her coat, still thick with winter’s fur, is a muted dusty rose on top of heavy muscle. Her black lined lips smell of a recent meal, leaving her brown eyes inquisitive and curious without the distraction of a grumbling stomach. But her instincts continue to pull at her, unsatisfied with her complacency, begging for more. The pack mentality runs deep in her blood and years of hunting alone has left her callous and unfeeling, drained by the silence as a lone wolf.
So east she goes - to a place she had never been before, far past Loess where the smell of her brother is long since dead. Perhaps she missed the sea. Not the wolf, of course; the little wolf didn’t care for the salt and the sun, but the slender palomino did. And ironically so, though the blue-tinged mare did not care for a family or a home, but the wolf did.
After all, there must be balance.
Daye huffs, the dark brown of her eyes taking in the unfamiliar landscape. She follows the sound of the ocean, coming into the cove with mud caked across her rose gold chest, paws tingling as they press lightly onto the silvery sand. Her sides rise and fall with the exertion from her travels, slowing her lope into a choppy trot as the expanse of beach becomes more open, unafraid as she moves out from beneath the shadows.
The wolf scents the filly first. She slows to a lazy walk, the sea breeze picking playfully at the thick fur at her nape. The girl is strikingly familiar and Daye does not stop her careful stride towards her, realizing it is the same ivory filly she had come across the other day. Perhaps it was fate that brought her here, the wolf tells herself amusedly.
The dusty red wolf halts on a dime, then, as a tigress comes to meet the young girl.
Fate, indeed.
Daye is frozen mid-step, one sandy forepaw suspended in the air. Her wet nose shivers, taking in the scent of the feline as memories she thought to be gone now suddenly flash across her mind. Sochi. The wolf’s lithe figure moves forward, back into a walk but more purposeful this time, her tail timidly swaying behind her.
She halts a few feet away from the duo, her intelligent eyes never leaving the large tigress. She does not fall to her belly, but lowers her head, peering up at Sochi from beneath an amused crinkle of her brow. A soft whine presses through her teeth before her voice, hushed and curious, speaks her name. “Sochi.”
Though she had eaten her fill only a day ago, suddenly her stomach roils with what Daye can only assume is hunger, but perhaps it is much more.
Dayé
where the sun would set, trees are dead, and the rivers were none.
@[sochi] @[Mazikeen]