Jasper Rocks i go back to december all the time

Random Event: Taima startled a flock of birds.

It turns out freedom ain't nothing but missing you, wishing I'd realized what I had when you were mine. I'd go back to December, turn around and make it all right. I go back to December all the time...

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March 19th; Afternoon; Gray skies, impending snow storm...

Again, Rabbit pulled herself from Mirren, but this time she was certain she would not go back. Maybe... Possibly... She liked - no... - loved how it felt to be close to him, to be just within earshot of him, to settle down close to him if only to stave away the memories that continued to haunt her. He was, at present, her security blanket of sorts. She needed him... Very much so. Maybe she could just spend one night away from him. Once night. Just this once... She needed to talk to someone closer to home and she knew just where to find them once she had realized just which set of trees were nearby.

That one tree that had somehow managed to have its space invaded by another, with the two of them leaning and growing away from one another. That one boulder that Hocus often peed on just in case he ever got lost and had to refer back to a certain landmark. That one particular tree with a hollowed out section in its trunk; the owl that used to live there was gone, but Taima was certain it was spending its winter somewhere much warmer...

...she was almost home.

The energy spent to navigate her way to Jasper Rocks had been absolutely worth it. Every single step of the way. Despite her empty stomach and gurgling in complaint over a few mouthfuls of snow for breakfast, she managed to follow the paths she had made before and improve on them; eventually she branched out until she met the small creek that would accompany her through the Cedarwood, its frozen shores and gurgling stream still snaking along the ground on her left side. The snow here seemed manageable, only reaching up just past her elbows, but by the time she found her way to the familiar group of fir trees, she was exhausted. Just a bit further, she encouraged herself, steadying herself on her four teetering limbs. She placed her right forepaw on a sizable stone then put her left forepaw on another stone not far from it. The winter, having been as brutal as it had been these past few months should have frozen this part of the creek... or so she hoped.

Holding her breath, she took a few steps forward, inching forth onto the solid ice and feeling the icy water soak her the pads of her paws and the spaces between them. If she slid along the first half of the creek then one or two quick hops would suffice in clearing he small stream altogether.

Here goes nothing... One sliding step, two sliding steps... three steps, four... and a JUMP!

She landed on the frozen bank, the impact of her leap making her paws slide forward in the snow and plant her face into the frost. Lifting her head and gasping for breath, she panted, turning her head to face the mountain of snow that could only be the boulders where her older siblings, Prosper and Theo, had been laid to rest. Straightening up, she staggered through the virgin snow, shuffling forward as to push the blanket of white aside and make a path for herself. This was where her father had often spent his time... To think, meditate, relax, and reflect back on his his younger days... Taima had only known this from her constant ventures in wandering away from the old bear den and following Borden to this very place. Only now did she truly comprehend just how important this location was. Once, she might have sworn he was talking to some imaginary friend, or pleading with some unseen deity to grant him their blessings; now, Taima understood that her father came to this spot to converse with the spirits of her lost brothers.

She opened her mouth to speak as she stared at the snow-covered stones, frost clinging to their jagged faces as the winds began to pick up. She closed her eyes and folded back her ears as a wintery gust hurled itself against her face and over her thinning frame. Maybe she had come at a terrible time... This was how Prosper and Theo expressed their displeasure upon seeing their baby sister draw close to their safe haven. When the wind died down for just a brief moment, Taima wagged her tail, but stopped the gesture as soon as she realized that something was... off. She froze and the fur at the back of her neck stood straight up. Then...

CAW! CAWWW! CAW! CAW! CAWWWWWW! CAW!

The girl ducked down, brought to her elbows and stomach as a murder of crows took flight above her from their perches. She trembled as she winced. Prosper and Theo were definitely upset. "I-I'm sorry!" she cried, find her voice at last when the cawing and scolding had ceased. "I'm so sorry..." She wrapped her tail around herself as she curled into a ball, frightened beyond measure. "It was an accident... I-I never meant to leave them." Like a cub, she began to whimper and cry, her voice reduced to a string of susurrant notes. "It was an accident."

It's a cold and broken world—the darkness is thickening, rolling in, subtle, for it comes in the guise of whiteness, snow, a cover for the sky. Everything's gray, between the trees and above, and the savage hunger of relentless winter is in the wind, in its cold, cutting edge. It's refusing to yield to spring despite the time of year, clinging hard to their frozen world, trying to hold out just a little longer.Cézanne was trying to hold out, too.She was thinner than she ought to be, gaunt and long-legged, too narrow around her chest and waist. She was—admitted to, bitterly—old. She wasn't supposed to starve and freeze, and the faltering of her heart was just another sign that spring couldn't come too early now. Cézanne gritted her teeth. Not that she would ever give in, collapse, and whisper why did the world do this to me?. No. She was a wolf, she took what she wanted and clung fiercely to life, taking and taking and taking until the darkness took her. She would never give up, go of her own accord.So she swept through the world like a hollow ghost, existence and thoughts reduced to nothing but an aching emptiness. Hunger defined her world. Hunger, and the memory of warm flesh and warm blood in her jaws; a memory which became a promise, a promise of better times, a dream and a guide through the white-out.The sky was snow-dark—which is to say, quite light, but still dark somehow. Dreary.She bared her teeth in a sneer.

But only for a moment.A cacophony of birds broke the stillness of the early evening, their voices mocking of the starved wolves—the fluttering of their wings mockery of the wolves' lack thereof. Out of reach, caw caw, the flap of their salvation, and the sound of Cézanne's doom. Her lantern-eyes stared longingly towards the treetops. Her ears knew the sound of their hearts, beating in their chests, but her teeth were too far away to silence it.

She wasn't at all sure what she was doing, wasting energy slogging through snow, but if you never sought, you never found, right? The murder of crows had stopped her in her tracks, and with a smoking sigh Cézanne bent her head against the furious wind and went on. She had lost much of her grace; she simply powered on, plowing through the soft white, going more on sheer stubbornness than any actual strength, or energy.Have to admire the tenacity of predators.Life. She froze again; cold, nearly blocked nose sniffing the air. Warmth. An unfamiliar scent. Her face hardened. Wolf.Cézanne knew nothing of where she stood, by the boulders guarding two dead boys—she saw only the snow and the telltale shape of rocks, and the murder of crows with their beady eyes glancing down from above. Warily she went on, until the tufts of gray fur stood out against the white backdrop. Cézanne's eyes were slits against the wind, smoldering with their yellow fire and determination, but the rest of her was lackluster and matted. The wolf curled up in the snow looked much the same: thin, and dull, somehow. Pitiful. Was she giving in? Hoping someone else would come save her?She was the only one who could save herself.» Are you going to die? « Cézanne began dispassionately, too cold and hungry to put any inflection in her voice. She stood much the same way; upright, but for all the strength of her mind her body was silent, saying nothing with its angles and presence.» Because if you do, I might as well wait here and eat you. «Cézanne was patient. She could wait. She could commit atrocities in order to survive—but some lines she would not cross.

Taima could have laid there forever... to wait for the cold to lull her to sleep, to wait for morning to come again, to wait for her father to return to this hallowed place. But, her apologies had not gone unanswered once the half the flock settled back down in their treetop homes above her. It came in the form of a somewhat serpentine voice, hardened by hunger and possibly fashioned by her experiences in years. "Are you going to die?" she had asked. The young Lyall, clearly startled, gathered her feet beneath her, turning so that she could face hew newfound company. Her ears apprehensively drew back and her tail bristled as it made to angle itself towards her belly.

The woman before her, had Taima not been as attentive as she was, looked almost like Naira, but her voice told her otherwise, " Because if you do, I might as well wait here and eat you.".....

The girl's jaw quivered, "N-no? I..." She forced herself to quickly look over the woman, to read her body language and look for any revealing markings of identification before revealing anything. One briefly stolen look, particularly into her pair of vivid yellow eyes, told her that she did not know this particular soul. Though, something at the back of her memory nudged her to think that there was something eerily familiar in how the stranger had presented herself.

"You'll be waiting a-a long time then," she countered, inwardly trying to draw some confidence in the fact that she was so very close to Grizzly Hollow. If she had to put Mapplethorpe' and Kade's formal training to use - how to delicately handle a situation in which she could be easily upended and how to stand her ground in the face of another - this was was it; and, she would not let their words go to waste. She straightened her tail out behind her to that it tensely pointed down to the ground... better down than tucked between her legs.

She swallowed hard, biting back the fright that threatened to overtake her, "Do I... know you?" She immediately thought back to the nameless woman who had taken her away, the monster of a man who had trespassed onto pack territory when she and her siblings were younger, to Aniu... Aniu? The idea went up in a puff of smoke. Her eyes narrowed suspiciously; and, momentarily, before the wind could flatten them again, her ears came up in genuine interest. "You seem familiar."

And the dead rise...Perhaps she was not as gone as Cézanne had thought. Gray shifted upon the snowy ground, rose into the shape of a lean, young wolf, rising to defend the spark of life—the flame they all carried within, the pulse, the heart. The warmth, she thought grimly, in this cursed winter. Her dark lips were set across her teeth, hiding her arsenal from the young female.It was that line: the line she would not cross. If the girl had simply withered and died, she could've eaten her, for survival, joined the perished flame of her life to Cézanne's, fed it to a roaring fire; but she would not kill her simply for whatever meat she might have upon her bones. And in truth, it pleased her more to see the creature gather her strength and wits to battle winter instead of just give in. Cézanne would go hungry a bit longer, but so be it. Eventually, there would be food again.» Pity, « she replied, still dispassionate, watching the girl from a dead face. With a disinterested sigh Cézanne took her eyes off the girl, looked back up upon the trees, wishing the birds would fall in a rain of black feathers and useless wings—it was hopeless and stupid and at some other time she would've laughed at her own absurdity. But hunger makes you wish for wonders.» I'm patient, « said the queen in an off-hand manner.I'm not sure she even heard what Taima said, dreaming of birds falling from the trees.

"Do I... know you?" It caught her attention, pulled her back from her delusional longing, and, blinking those vivid eyes, she looked at the wolf again. It was no longer cowering, ears brazenly forward and tail hanging down. Cézanne's tail lifted without second thought, gaze hardening. She'd liked the girl better with her tail against her belly.» No. «She'd never seen the wolf before. At least, not that she knew; Cézanne had met many wolves, and discarded them as useless, worthless, unworthy of remembrance. And so, she certainly couldn't know Cézanne. Because Cézanne would know if she knew. And that childish logic was just as irritating as the wish for birds to fall, spawned from her hunger, her cold, the delirious state of existence she found herself suspended in. If she'd been less weak, she would've taken it out on the girl in front of her; as it was, all she had the strength to do was narrow her cold eyes.

"Pity," the woman had commented. Taima did her best to keep a straight face. "I'm patient." Had she imagined Borden and her imaginary 'friend,' she probably would have heard them in her head, urging her to make a run for it... She decided to be brave, to weather the conversation she had engaged in. If she was going to prove herself as her father's daughter, an identity she was slowly attempting to recover, this was her chance. As the stranger told her with a simple 'no' that Taima did not know her, the young Lyall gave a slight nod, not wanting to pry anymore information from her, except...

"Do you know Borden?" she tried next, the tone of her voice emboldening at the pronunciation of her father's name. "Or Jaysyek?" She quickly tacked on a few extra things that would hopefully render her in a more empowering sort of light, one that affiliated her with her family despite not smelling of them, "They live around here; I've just come to visit." Though the twitching of her nose made it apparent that she was trying to glean from the woman any possibly familiar scent, Taima held her tongue. After living with Sagacity, Naira, and Mapplethorpe as her superiors, she knew now that not all pack wolves carried their pack's scent in their fur. Maybe... Maybe after she had run off with that older woman from the Aniwaya pack, her parents made better use of their members and resources by adopting a harsher, no-nonsense sort of protocol, and this wolf before her was doing as she had been told: keep other rogues away. At all cost.

But, the mention of either of the Grizzly Hollow Leaders would have, should have, made her face change for the better. Right? Taima tried the next best thing after asking so much of her conversation 'buddy.' "I think there might be some good hunting grounds near here," she offered, straining to keep her voice lighthearted and friendly. "Do you want to hunt with me?" It was childish she knew, but instinct alone was telling her that if any good could come from such an encounter, then the prospect of teamwork could possibly yield something beneficial and well-needed: food.

Sometimes she wondered why she was out here, what purpose she had, what the world had to offer her—or for her to take. She was utterly unimpressed by this corner of the world, yet winter had trapped her, crippling her with hunger and an ache in her joints.It didn't please her.And so she was stuck, snapping halfheartedly at whatever came too close. Or stood dreaming dumbly of dead birds raining down into her open maw. The young wolf sharing the scene with her seemed to come and go from Cézanne's mind, drifting out the moment she fell silent, only to make her ears slide forward with each breath and word. Trapped in a dream, Cézanne listened with half an ear, and lowered her mouth to nip listlessly at the snow.

Borden. Jaysyek. Cézanne could care less if the risen wolf was here to visit or conquer.» No, « she said again, uttering her favorite word with the same lack of inflection. With snow lining her muzzle she went on, » Do you know Mapplethorpe? « – because fat chance of her doing. He was half a world away or more, but Cézanne was a stupid, stubborn old queen who intended to make even iron bend at her merest breath. Whatever had convinced her she had enough time to go to the ends of the earth and back just to find her brother? She knew that she did not have long left, was childless, far away from Vigilate Keep...Her restless mind wandered, but the young girl spoke again, and the words caught Cézanne's attention. Her head snapped up from her snow-snuffling, for a moment trapping her in a fierce, vigilant pose—but winter had stolen her strength and after a moment her glory faded, grew dull.She wanted to bite the world for its audacity.

» If there's anything left, « she offered pessimistically, voice still flat and dead. But she was not fool enough to deny help. By the looks of it, they both needed the gush of hot blood down their throats, flesh to fill out the empty spaces within, to grow strong again, and sleep warm instead of cold. I'm not dead yet, she snarled at the world in her head, flicking her raised tail and moving a little forward. It was cruel, what the merest hope, and hint, of food did to her, breathed onto the smoldering embers of her last reserves. Nose all a-twitch and her heart pounding some of its last ferocity, Cézanne glanced down at her companion, and then out into the forest again.Lead us to glory.

Again the singular word came from the stoic woman. That was that; she was just another lone rogue, a stranger to her, her parents, and possibly anyone else Taima and Rabbit kn-- "Do you know Mapplethorpe?" Rabbit was taken aback, feeling as though she had fallen through thin ice and left to drown in the frigid depths. There was no feasible way that there could be more than one Mapplethorpe in the world. It seemed to the girl that with a name as unique as his, there was only him... and given how he ran things within the pack under Naira's rule - with everything being a secret and figuratively kept under lock and key - there couldn't have been any reason for someone to know her former Leader's name unless the woman had known Mapplethorpe from some time ago. The story she had always heard in regards to him coming to Relic Lore was that he had been a nomad in search of something or someone to give him purpose. The first wolf he had ever met was some dark-furred man that had once been Naira's mate. Datura's father.

By logic and the process of deduction, it only made sense that the woman had either known him when she lived with the wolves of Nomads Pass or some time before he came to the Lore. She agreed to hunt with her though, and for that Rabbit was rather glad. It gave her enough time to debate whether or not to reveal what she knew. As she began to lead the way towards where she knew a rabbit warren had once stood, she briefly looked back at the stranger, almost certain now that maybe she was related in some way to her former mentor. Now that she had noticed it, she might have sworn that the tawny-pelted stranger had the same-colored eyes as Naira's equal.

"I do know Mapplethorpe," she declared before turning back to the path she was forging in front of her. "He's the head of a pack east of here." She fell silent for a moment to make sure she had her orientation right; it wasn't too hard to remember those long winter days when she and Mirren had traveled away from the rising sun in the morning and in the direction of the setting sun in the west. Feeling as though she at last had the upper hand in the conversation she allowed herself to slightly simper to herself. Kade and her father would have been proud. She was sure of it.

"They live in a part of the Lore with crooked trees, where the sun barely shines through the branches and the ground smells of rotten carcasses," she divulged, letting the words tumble from her mouth. She could care less now about what she said, so long as she, herself, remained protected by feeding the other information they wanted to hear. Additionally, she was no longer considered apart of Hollowheart Keep, and she boldly reminded herself of the fact by continuing on in a nonchalant manner, "He's serving some arrogant woman who calls herself a queen..."

(This post was last modified: Apr 08, 2014, 07:35 PM by Taima.)

Ugh I suck.

Silence—as expected from a stranger barely half-grown. Cézanne's judgmental scorn colored her world, stark lines between shadow and light, the importance of others falling into the dusty snow by her feet, to be trampled. It was not, after all, her fault if they got underfoot; if they were not important enough for her to notice. With somewhat of a sneer disguised as a sniff as the yearling wolf passed underneath her nose the Queen followed. It was certainly more dignified to let the zombie lead the way than walk ahead of her and have to listen to shouted directions.Then something happened. Something absolutely, utterly amazing."I do know Mapplethorpe," said the rabbit, and » What? « yelped the Queen.Most undignified. And embarrassing. She snapped her jaws shut and listened, unwilling to interrupt what precious little news there was of her wayward brother.

And at the same time, she had to marvel at the sheer irony of it all—here she'd been starving all winter, thinking her brother was far, far away still.. when he wasn't. If only she'd gone further east. It was stupid to beat herself up about it, and it was just stupid at all. "He's serving some arrogant woman who calls herself a queen..." The young wolf's voice seemed distant, as if speaking through a dream, painting a most unflattering image in her lethargic mind; her brother, serving someone else? She'd have to find this female and rip her from her throne, leave her sobbing and broken in the dust, tarnished and faded in the shadow of Cézanne's radiant glory; there is only one queen.» I see, « she said stonily, distant, voice hushed and mind far away, thinking of her traitor brother who consorted with someone else—did he not know that his only true greatness lay with Cézanne? That only she could tear the heavens down and raise them up among the stars?It seemed he had forgotten a lot of things.She would have to remind him.

While Rabbit continued to snuffle about with her nose to the ground and tail in the air, she clung to the noise the tawny woman had made. It was exactly the type of response that she had wanted to hear from her. "I see," the rogue finally said, but the girl was already busy with deciding which direction to go. She took a moment to stop some ways away from where she had initially scared the murder of crows, craning her head from left to right and back again while trying to test if there was anything to be had. Surely, there had to be... Wolfbirds rarely hung out for the sake of company, and when there was more than one, let alone, a flock of them, there just had to be something edible within reach.

When the woman had caught up, Rabbit strode forward, simply following her nose. "Why do you ask?" she casually tossed a question to her scavenging companion. "The man doesn't have his head in the right place." Whether or not she was downright insulting him, Rabbit could have cared less. The woman had started it all and the Lyall was going to let it all come out and down, like an avalanche upon an unsuspecting age-old forest. "He meant to groom me into a Leader, to shape me in the image of a powerful woman he had once known," she off-handedly declared. "Then he dropped me without even saying a word about whether or not my training was complete. After that it was always about his beloved @Naira."

She crumpled the bridge of her muzzle with an unbecoming scowl. "She got everything. Every scrap of food, every bone, every pelt... His attention and his scrutiny, even his displays of dominance and submission. I thought he liked me... maybe even loved me like the daughter he didn't have. So I left him." For a second, she thought she got a whiff of something in the air and decided to move in the direction she thought she had detected it from. "As far as I'm concerned, he had live and die by her. He probably wouldn't know a real Queen if she actually looked at him in the face; Naira might be older than me, but I obviously showed much more promise than she ever had when I lived under her." She shrugged as she lowered her head again, dragging her nose across the snow, "My mate and I should have ousted them out of power, but I've long since been separated from him. I intend to find him, but I have no intentions of returning to that prison of a place. Mapplethorpe and Naira can die there, together, for all I care."

A fight broke out between two male mountain goats. Hunt Opportunity