Sochi;

[sochi]

there are wolves in my head and their howling
there was a garden of evil in the palm of my hand

Sochi wouldn’t say she is a fantastic mother, but neither is she an utter failure at one.

She loves her daughter, does her best to watch over her, but she doesn’t hover or try to keep her tucked away. Reia deserves to explore and adventure and find her limitations the same as any wild animal. As soon as she was confident that the girl could be trusted to go out on her own, she was content to watch her disappear into the horizon. Content to clean her off and listen to her stories when she returned.

After all, her dragon-baby was not the average child. She hunted already, her belly already hungering for more than just milk—which suited Sochi just fine as she had little patience for anything else.

Still, she looks forward to meeting up with Reia on the wintery isle and hearing her latest stories, pressing a motherly kiss into her forehead and then exploring the new land by her side. She arrives first and she finds the press of the snow to be too much—too cold, too foreign. Shivering, she shifts into her more familiar tigress form, the thick fur comforting and warm. The snow barely reaches her now.

When she sees her daughter’s struggle, the exhausting flight, and the eventual landing, it brings a spark to her feline eye. She pads through the snow to where it bleeds into the sand, the winter clinging to her.

She doesn’t make a move to comfort her daughter.

Instead, she just nods.

“It will get faster with time.”

Although she has no frame of reference—no real way of knowing just how long it would take to master flight—she knows that it is a predator’s skill and all such things just take time.

now I'm broken and bleeding, I’ll never find my way

S

OCHI

stranger in this land

@[Reia]