Larkcall Lowlands Just Around the Bend

ooc: For @Ryvet. Dated 9/10/2015, around midday. Sunny weather, 63°F. The new subterritory will look like this, and is in the region indicated on this edited version of the RoW map. I received permission from Ghost and Cadence to pp Minka and Gent having given Calanthe permission to leave pack territory.

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Calanthe's fur pricked uneasily as she wandered past the boundaries of the Crest pack's territory and out into Stonewatch Timbers. She hadn't done this save for one other time since joining the Crest, and the last time she had stayed just outside the borders and to the east, where the forest was more familiar to her. She had come from the east, after all - now she turned her paws north, through the sliver of timbers that separated Round Stone Crest from the great swath of tundra land she now knew to be called the Larkcall Lowlands. That tundra was her intended destination; she had even been sure to wake as early as she could manage so that she could arrive before it became too late in the day, though she had resigned herself to the fact that she would probably still return late into the night, if not the following morning. Such an excursion might have made her a bit nervous, if it wasn't for the fact that she had already received permission from  @Gent and @Minka both to go so far from the Crest - though it had come with Gent's stipulation that she return as soon as she could, which was fine with Calanthe. She was only visiting the tundra at all so that she could familiarize herself with the layout of the land; surely that would only be an asset once she began hunting for the pack. If she brought back a kill this time, so much the better, but for now her primary focus was on exploring the Lowlands. The trees gradually gave way to a great, open expanse of grassy land, marked only by rocky hills that rose close enough to each other to make the whole land seem to have frozen mid-ripple. With no trees to break the wind, Calanthe found herself buffeted more intensely by cool air and the scents and sounds it carried with it. Excitement long locked away began tingling through her legs again; this was no mundane stretch of land. There were secrets here, and she was eager to discover them. She gave herself a hard shake, trying to work off some of the nervous energy that seemed to buzz through her fur before continuing forward, travelling somewhat to the north-northeast and pausing frequently to use this or that crest to scan the area from a higher vantage point. She wasn't being as careful as she perhaps should be; the thought hadn't yet occurred to the pale woman that there might be other wolves here as well, or that there were other, far less rational predators who competed with wolves for food and other resources - nor had she considered that she was more visible on higher ground, especially here where the only growing things were hardy grasses and tough little shrubs and bushes, all of them too short to conceal her from this altitude. Her fourth or fifth perch treated her to a view partially blocked out by something that gleamed in the sunlight. From where she stood, the light reflected perfectly off of what she assumed must be a pond or small lake, making Calanthe's eyes water from the brightness. She hopped down from her hill in two great leaps down its face, then trotted on towards the water, curious to see how wide it was and how deep it might be. She didn't plan on doing any fishing, but neither would she keep the location of this place to herself if it did prove to be a good fishing spot. And even if it didn't have any fish, at least it would provide a place to stop and get a drink, so either way it would hopefully turn out to be a valuable resource for future excursions.

(This post was last modified: Sep 11, 2015, 01:19 AM by Calanthe.)

There was an undeniable sadness in the air around the newly reformed Grizzly Hollow, and he wasn’t quite sure what bought him down more? Borden’s slow decline, the way his brother moped about the territory, illusive to even poor Quil. The sight of his brother's son didn’t bring him the joy it should have. Increasingly they seemed to be drifting further and further apart, each person sticking to their designated rooms, doors shut tight. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

A chance encounter with Titan was what finally drove him away. A growl and a snap (entirely unwarranted he would only admit to himself) the final straw as he made his way to the border. He didn’t even bother to have words with @Rook, choosing instead to howl his farewells from the border. He was going scouting. He would be back when he was back. It would have to be enough to keep them happy.

Day by day his cares melted away with the distance between himself and home. Slumped shoulders lifted and downturned ears rose, one tilting forward, his head turned so one could hear behind him. The bears would be getting grouchy, competing for every last scrap they could manage before they slumbered the winter away.

He avoided the thicket pack, caring little for their current status with their proximity to his own he was still far too surly to make any reasonable impression. Perhaps on his journey home he would stop in. Still further north he travelled, unfamiliar ground underfoot, new scents and new sounds. This was what he had been searching for. The scent of a pack was unmistakable and so he skirted to the west, making note but again, not stopping by. There was always a chance he might encounter one of their members on errands further out and he could leave the leaders to their cubs. He couldn’t help but think he would resent being dragged away from his own by a stranger - should the day ever come.

Trees melted into oblivion and he paused atop a small crest, taking in the tundra before him, a chance breeze bought the scent of water and the weary traveller would not pass up a chance to drink. The scent clouded his mind so effectively he didn’t even notice the stranger approaching from the other side.

ooc: Enter the subterritory and my not-so-hidden rabid describer side!

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It took Calanthe maybe half an hour to reach the water; for a long while during her trek, it was completely out of sight, and with the wind blowing in the wrong direction she had to rely entirely on the fact that it lay to the west - in the same direction in which she was walking. She assumed it must be situated in some little depression in the ground, and that this was why she couldn't see it. All the same, so far her little adventure was going swimmingly, so rather than worry that she might walk straight by the pond, Calanthe continued to meander along at an easy pace, her head swivelling this way and that as she drank in her surroundings. She knew when she had reached the pond when she was blinded a second time by the sunlight bouncing off the surface of the water. With a muffled curse, the pale wolf slid carefully into the depression - for the moment too irritated to notice that she had been right about there being a depression - and then dipped her head and rubbed at one eye with her paw, as though she could bat the sun dazzle away. Despite her best efforts, it still took several seconds for her vision to clear enough for her to see again. She gave an irritable snort and shook out her mane, then lifted her head and gasped at the sight before her. The pond stretched out almost beyond her ability to see its opposite shore, though it was shallow enough that here and there small islands of turf and water grass rose up to break the otherwise crystalline surface. At a glance, Calanthe thought the thing must stretch out at least twenty or thirty feet across at its widest, and from the edge of it she could still see to the bottom, making it less than two feet deep, surely. That made it a little on the big side for a pond, but too tiny and too shallow for a lake. In one or two places, enough sediment had built up beneath the water (and enough weather-worn stones had surfaced around the shores) that the pond was very nearly broken up into one large body and several tiny satellite pools. Nearly, but not quite, because even these almost-land bridges were still fully submerged in a few inches of water - with the exception of the rocks themselves, of course. Her pale yellow eyes were wide in her head as Calanthe stepped closer to the edge of the pond, peering down into it from above. At this angle she could see all the different rocks and pebbles that lined its bottom; dipping a careful paw into the chilly water she scrapped her claws carefully along one rock, stirring up the thin layer of silt resting atop the rocks and sending glittering ripples skating across the surface. Those might even be the first real ripples the pond had seen in a long, long time, she realized with a childlike sense of awe. How many other creatures came to this place, and how frequently? She could tell it must be a spring, rather than a gathering of rainwater - there wouldn't be so much history in and around it if this was simply a basin that filled and emptied and refilled as the seasons changed. Stepping carefully - those first few ripples were more than enough for now - Calanthe picked her way across the stones until she reached one of the bigger turf islands, then hopped to the next one and the next until she reached the center of the pond. Again she looked down into the water, and now she could confirm that its deepest point didn't seem as deep as she stood tall on all fours. Less than two feet after all, then, and no fish, sadly. No little tadpoles or frogs, either, but maybe it wasn't the right season for them. She had never really paid much attention to slimy water creatures besides the fish. Something out of place in the edge of her vision finally dragged her attention away from the lovely water. Her sense of wonderment vanished like the fragile morning mist and was replaced immediately by a sharp pang of anxiety as she realized she was not the only wolf here. Worse, although the newcomer's fur was white, she could instantly tell it was not @Alphinaud, who although a newcomer to the Crest was nonetheless a pack mate. No, this stranger held himself differently than Alphinaud, and seemed just a bit larger than Calanthe's pack mate. She cursed the wind for blowing in the wrong direction - and then cursed herself for not being more careful. By now she had heard about others of her pack - both past and present members - who had met with grizzly disasters while wandering alone beyond the Crest pack's boundaries. @Raela's encounter with the outsider @Vitani rocketed through Calanthe's mind, and the young woman froze for a moment. Could she be mistaken about this wolf's gender? Vitani was a white wolf, too, according to what Calanthe had heard... ...No, no, she was right. This was a male wolf, and therefore not Vitani. Calanthe's legs felt weak with momentary relief, and it was only by the work of a miracle that the woman didn't fall into the water outright as she quickly hopped back onto solid land again, one ear still turned towards the stranger. She kept her pose as neutral as she could once she reached the shore, though she knew she must still seem a bit uncomfortable as she closed some of the distance between them. She could only hope this man wouldn't mistake her uneasiness for aggression; she had trained under @Gent to defend herself, but she knew she was a great ways off from being anything even resembling a serious threat in battle... She stopped some fifteen or so feet from the stranger, not wanting him to feel as though she was coming to start any trouble. Besides that, she wanted to give herself plenty of room to bolt should he come barrelling after her, although she couldn't imagine why he would. Better to play this encounter safe rather than be sorry for failing to do so later on. “Hello,” she called with what she hoped was a relaxed smile. The chances of it looking more nervous than friendly were pretty high, unfortunately. “Lovely place, isn't it?”

He weaved through tussocks of grass and rolling hills, finally his miss-matched eyes landing on what his nose had told him was here all along. In the process of lowering his head to drink his glance fell on a pale wolf hopping from hump to hump across the shallow pools surface. His smirk was concealed as he lowered his head to drink, wondering just how long it would be before she noticed him.

It seemed it would take her longer than he had anticipated, knowing she had spotted him when she almost lost her balance within sight of solid land. He managed to contain the laughter that threatened to break loose, instead twisting his face so that only a smile showed (although his eyes were dancing with mirth). He kept his tail resting between his heels, a slow wave offered in the hopes she would realise he wasn’t a threat (although man did she look nervous). Her voice didn’t carry her nerves though so he offered a friendly smile of his own. “Hi.” he responded much more casually, eyes casting over the pond before returning to rest staring non-threateningly just past her shoulder. An easy smile on his snowy face. “It is.”

This wasn’t a path he had travelled before. He considered the wolf before him, who had stopped more than a reasonable distance away and he lowered his rear to the ground to further illustrate he had no intention of causing her harm, he even slid down to his elbows, paws throbbing in beat with the pace he had maintained to cover the distance between the Cedarwood and here. “Have you been travelling long?” he queried, detecting the scent of pack freshly on her fur while his was beginning to go stagnant. She clearly had the upper hand here in every regard.

At least the stranger seemed friendly enough, and although he smelled of a pack - spirit only knew what pack it was - the scent was beginning to fade just a bit, an indicator that he had not seen his mates for at least a few days, if not more. That put Calanthe a bit more at ease, as did the fact that the man sat and then even laid down in front of her. If he was a threat in any sense of the word, surely he wouldn't lower himself to that degree... would he?

Calanthe sat down as well, not comfortable towering over a stranger from a different pack; for all she knew, his rank in his pack was higher than the one she held in hers. Even if it wasn't, she felt rude just standing when he clearly didn't feel the need to. But she didn't lay down as he did. That was still a step farther than she was willing to go just to be civil.

Her ears perked up at his question; her initial reaction was to answer him honestly - to say that, no, she had barely taken more than a day of travel. Fortunately she caught herself before the words could leave her mouth. The Crest seemed very secluded from all other packs, and in Calanthe's experience nothing remained hidden unless it was important that it remain hidden. Surely Minka and @Gent would have reached out and formed some sort of alliance by now if that wasn't the case here, as well.

Instead she shrugged her shoulders and said, "I've been wandering for two sunrises. This will be my second night away from home. What about you?" she added, knocking the ball back into the stranger's court. Maybe she could fluster him enough that he would drop the subject of how far and from where she had travelled, and focus instead on anything else at all.

Parted jaws panted in a relaxed fashion, his journey had been such a long one. When she countered his question with one of her own, salmon tongue dragged across ivory lips retreating back behind momentarily clenched teeth, breathing a single breath through his nose before he answered. He did not hold his brothers paranoia, so what if wolves knew Grizzly Hollow had been revived? "About a week." he answered "From the Cedarwood." He couldn't be certain she would know the place, being as far south as it was.


The throbbing in his limbs was growing to be a distraction so he dared to stretch them out, curled toes arching towards the sky as his lips drew taught and eyes closed with a satisfied groan. "Being more of a local than myself do you know is this place has a name...?" he would have tacked her name on the end if he had known it but he quickly realised he hadn't even introduced himself yet. She still seemed a bit uneasy and he didn't want to push her too hard. "I'm Ryvet, Ryvet Lyall." he offered, pushing up on his forelegs to raise himself to a seated position.

A week of traveling? Calanthe couldn't imagine anyone going that far from home without reason, but then, who was she to judge? Wasn't she out and about away from her own pack, and really without any good reason for it? Besides, just because she couldn't imagine being away so long didn't mean the idea never crossed anyone else's mind. Maybe he had just gotten a little antsy?

...Or could he be out scouting for his pack? The likelihood was there, after all; maybe he was looking for allies, or for new territory. She should keep that in mind if he asked her any other questions about her family.

Fortunately, he changed the topic to the pond, although the way he trailed off and then introduced himself reminded her that she had yet to introduce herself, either. As soon as Ryvet finished his own introduction, she dipped her head quickly - a gesture of politeness, not if submission - and answered, "I'm Calanthe Quickfoot. And no, as far as I know, we might be the first wolves to have stumbled upon it; no one I know mentioned it before I left, although it's far enough from my pack that it makes sense for no one else to have found it, yet."

She tilted her head and glanced back across the pond thoughtfully. "You know, from here it looks a little like a sea, with the way the light shines across the surface..."