09-10-2021, 01:10 PM
The mountain kingdom is the only home that Malik knows. The craggy peaks, deep valleys, and moonglow lake are as familiar to him as the markings along his forelegs. He has spent all of the childhood he recalls here in the peaks of Beqanna, and cannot imagine a life beyond the high winds and the comfort of his Pack.
He thinks of them - his friends - this way while he wears the shape of a massive black wolf, prowling through the shallow snow in the forest.
There’d been a Pack in Hyaline once, he knows, back when his mother was the Alpha instead of the Queen, and there had been less fear in Hyaline. Malik had never known that world, but he likes his just fine, and likes to think that if the Pack were to return, it would be all the stronger for it.
He’ll need to be stronger too, he knows. That awareness had driven him to the mountain, and secured him a quest through which he means to do so. Of course, completing that quest was something else entirely, so when he had come home, he’d immediately started looking for his mother.
Malik had caught her trail near the northern river, and has followed it past the high cliffs and into the well-forested mountains. He is catching up, that he is sure of, and she is also making no effort to hide her trail.
When he sees her - through shifted eyes able to pick out white coat on white snow - Malik calls out: “Mom!” and increases his pace. By the time he reaches her, the melanistic leopard has become instead a horse, just as dark and striped as he’d been as a cat. THe thick ruff of feathers along his neck glistens in the dim sunlight reflected from the snow, and his bi-colored eyes are as bright as the horns (now pronged with adolescence) that grow from near his ears.
“I went to the Mountain,” he tell her, and then waits to see her response. He’s sought her out for a reason rather than his father. Gale is vocal in his distrust of the Fae and Fairy kind, but Mazikeen has far less bias.
@Mazikeen
He thinks of them - his friends - this way while he wears the shape of a massive black wolf, prowling through the shallow snow in the forest.
There’d been a Pack in Hyaline once, he knows, back when his mother was the Alpha instead of the Queen, and there had been less fear in Hyaline. Malik had never known that world, but he likes his just fine, and likes to think that if the Pack were to return, it would be all the stronger for it.
He’ll need to be stronger too, he knows. That awareness had driven him to the mountain, and secured him a quest through which he means to do so. Of course, completing that quest was something else entirely, so when he had come home, he’d immediately started looking for his mother.
Malik had caught her trail near the northern river, and has followed it past the high cliffs and into the well-forested mountains. He is catching up, that he is sure of, and she is also making no effort to hide her trail.
When he sees her - through shifted eyes able to pick out white coat on white snow - Malik calls out: “Mom!” and increases his pace. By the time he reaches her, the melanistic leopard has become instead a horse, just as dark and striped as he’d been as a cat. THe thick ruff of feathers along his neck glistens in the dim sunlight reflected from the snow, and his bi-colored eyes are as bright as the horns (now pronged with adolescence) that grow from near his ears.
“I went to the Mountain,” he tell her, and then waits to see her response. He’s sought her out for a reason rather than his father. Gale is vocal in his distrust of the Fae and Fairy kind, but Mazikeen has far less bias.
@Mazikeen