you do not know who is your friend or who is your enemy until the ICE breaks. The older man seemed pleasant, courteous, everything he'd somehow guessed when seeing his regal form for the first time - mere minutes ago, and yet he was already submerged up to the ears in this meeting. Stars, despite the physical daylight, coated the encounter like a veil. Ice had always been prone to daydream and heroify things. That a worn white old male was the flint that struck sparks from the steel of his mind wasn't strange, nor that a small fire caught. It was nice to think about something.. well, else for a while, dream of past glories. Besides, it'd been so long since he'd met someone who spoke in the same polite patterns as he did, and the sound of Alexander's voice was comforting, spell-binding. To inch even closer wouldn't be polite, though, so he remained where he was, eyes bright and ears alert for words - the spitting image of an eager youth wanting to know more. Grizzly Hollow - temporary home. That was... curious indeed. Grizzly Hollow was the pack the starved female he'd met had belonged to, before losing a rank challenge and fleeing. In Cedarwood Forest - to the south of their current location, then, west of Swift River. He nodded thoughtfully, storing the information in his labyrinthine mind. If he were to let someone else into his brain and ask them to locate a piece of information or understand how he categorized his knowledge and thoughts - well, they'd likely get lost in three seconds and scold him for being confusing.
"Temporary?" he quizzed, thought cautiously; it was an open question, spoken in such a way that it didn't require an answer if he didn't want to give one - it could be brushed off as an ...exclamation of sorts. Ice was curious, no doubt about it, but he didn't want to offend the white male. Something in him found even the risk of doing it abhorrent, and it took an effort of will to suppress the shudder. He didn't know why it was important, why he cared so much about the regards of a kind underweight stranger with a dirty off-white coat - it just was. Instinct, chemistry, imagination? There could be several reasons, but he wasn't about to question it. If he questioned every moderately strange thing he did, thought or felt, he'd be left with a strict, heartless and boring life. Being a little impulsive and moon-eyed livened things up.
He knew very well of the mountains, having spent a summer by his den in the Riddle Heights before coming down to seek a pack. Parts of them were harmless, with not-so-steep slopes and broad paths; others were sharp drops, narrow roads, treacherous edges and wind-buffeted plateaus. Easy to fall if you were unwary, or unlucky. And his friends had thought him dead? It must've been one cursed fall, then, to convince them of such - or, they hadn't been friends in the first place. But how could someone not wholeheartedly like this male..? It was beyond him, and the way he tried to brush it off as only luck - humble. "Must've been a very nasty fall," he murmured, gazing at the sky. The range was too far away, and this cursed hedge too thick, to see, but he knew how Mount Dire towered above Relic Lore like a constant reminder of their mortality and nature's might. He liked it, but he didn't like the idea of falling somewhere up there. Rocks didn't make for soft landings. "And I'd like to disagree. Lucky or not, if you hadn't had strength, you would've died anyway - given up, stopped eating, stopped drinking, stopped caring..." He gave a casual shrug, watching the male for signs of excessive disagreement - or well, enough disagreement to top the "how much of Alexander's ill will I can take" meter. "I believe you had strength, because you're alive and sitting here right in front of me, are you not?" He gave a slight smile, expecting Alexander to disagree with him - politely, of course. He couldn't picture the old man enraged. Subtly - or well, as subtly as Ice was capable of - he tried to steer the conversation onwards, hoping Alexander wouldn't answer his rhetorical question or shout at him that he was wrong. "Did you locate your old friends after you recovered?" .ice aesir |