Midnight Plateau your guilty crown

@Gilligan

A grown man had made him cry here, once.

Datura himself had been half a man. Must have been sometime before his first birthday. The mountain was covered in snow. It was something about the sky, something about the way the light lay across the snow so early in the morning. Or at least, that was what he had been told. Now there was no snow to worry about. And the sky, so grey and cloudless, could hardly concern him either. He was safe. He exhaled. Somehow he still feared the ghost of this memory, as if he half expected the steel-white man to be here again to extract from him all his weaknesses. But he was alone. There would be no one to watch him now as his eyes carefully traveled the now long-abandoned territory of Midnight Plateau.

He wasn't quite sure why he had chosen to come here rather than return to where he had known Nomad's Pass to be. Perhaps because he was afraid, truly afraid, that he would find the more of the same in that narrow gorge he had once called home. More windswept, forgotten crevices; wind beaten footfalls of long gone wolves. He knew he could not hope for Nomad's Pass, for this mother to still be there. She was resilient, but he was also learned now. The world was a cruel place that took and took. It would take from his mother, it would take from him. He did not wish to look upon yet another broken dream.

The golden man inhaled sharply. He had told Gilligan to meet him here, at the plateau. He hoped he was not still holding on to his childish pride. He was too young to be on his own, much more naive and foolish than he himself at been at that tender age. He suppressed the thoughts of Taima. No, he had been a smart boy. A good boy.

His tuneless voice rose into the sky, hoping that his son would come.

He'd gotten lost.  He hadn't meant to get lost, really, but first he'd been rather upset with his father for trying to steal his star.  Gone off in a huff, he'd ended up in a forest he only knew by stories.  Childish still, he couldn't stay in one place long, not with an empty belly and a hungry heart.  The yearling managed to orbit around the mountain on the whole, remembered that very specifically, but he could not find Datura, and he could not find a place to stay.
 
It was like a damn miracle when he heard a familiar song in the distance.  Faint, far away, but he knew that tuneless call.  Throwing his fine head back, the young Aquila answered eagerly.  I'm coming! he whispered on the wind, and then his legs were moving, moving, sprinting, dashing, jumping, scrambling over rocks, around them when they were too large, and while it took entirely too long, he was here.
 
"Dad!" he crowed, bounding to the golden goliath's side.  "Dad, you're here!"  Reaching up, he lapped at the male's chin in greeting before mindlessly dropping to his belly, eager to prove that he was still a good son.  He shouldn't have run off like that (even if Datura did start it, he tried to take the star, not his star!).  Surely, though, his father understood that.  He couldn't stay mad – in fact, he didn't seem that mad, right?  Tail slapping against the earth, he whined softly, eyes searching the Aquila's face.  "Did you miss me?"

#R28-9

@Gilligan


Time passed, and yet somehow Datura only became more sure that his son would return to him. He counted the reasons as he came up with them. Gilligan needed him. Who else would teach him manners? That son of his had the mouth of a rotting carcass that so grated on Datura's refined soul. He would get eaten alive by the lords of the packs that clung to this unforgiving realm. They would take none of his sass, none of his filthy back-talk and his victim-complex. The golden man snorted. No, Gilligan would certainly come. Maybe it would be tomorrow, maybe it would be weeks but at some point the poor boy's wounded pride would carry him back to his father.

His father.

When the voice at last reached his ears he hardly even lifted his eyes. He stiffened at what most would consider a welcome gesture of subservience. He preferred that his son would not touch him, that no one would touch him, but he could never find it in him to tell others about this idiosyncrasy. In his heart he knew it was not acceptable. These thoughts he shoved aside as the dusty yearling lay prone before him, grovelling as he should. The Aquilan heir's gaze swept over his returned son apathetically. 

It was hard to know why he had done it, why he had taken the babe from his real parents. To some extent it must have been to fill some hole in him, the hole that knew he was nothing without a pack, without family. And he had proven that he would do anything to fill that hole. The hole that Belladonna had left in him, the hole that Naira had left, the hole his father left, the hole Taima left when she senselessly chose to take his only real son away to rot the forgotten tomb of Grizzly Hollow. 

A stirring in his chest told him that this boy would not be able to fill the hole. 

"A wolf's not meant to be alone, Boy." he drawled in an off-handed manner that both answered and neatly side-stepped the yearling's question. The golden man could now feign wisdom in a manner that had been previously unreachable to him, it appeared. He knew he was a not a smart man now. That he was just barely smart enough to fake it.  "It's not our nature." Not that two wolves was any better than one as far as Datura was concerned. Two wolves were powerless in a land where there were families of dozens. His family was very small indeed. 

"Did you at least learn something when you were off gallivanting through the country side?"

   

Wilting under the elder Aquila's gaze, the yearling's tail stilled and dropped against the dust.  Another, stilted whine escaped his maw as he tipped his head, sunburst eyes searching the large wolf for something – anything.  Apathy was impossible for the youth to read.  Truth be told, he suffered a bit of proper social experience, raised by a man who so valued imprisoning his emotions, and often overlooked the more subtle of social cues.  (Datura's stiffening at the submissive gesture moments ago, for instance, was completely overlooked.)
 
All the same, the collared wolf managed to wait in silence, eyes round and curious as he was measured.  The answer he sought was not the one he received, ushering another creel from the boy as he dropped his jaw to the ground below, flattening himself against the earth as well as he could.  Didn't his father see what a good wolf he was? Didn't his father see how deferential he was?  But still no answer came, and Gilligan was only left to assume that his father really didn't miss him all that much when he was instead probed in return.
 
Ears swept back as his expression hardened, shifting his face away from Datura's gaze.  "I hunted a squirrel," he replied with a fierce sulk, wrinkling his nose a bit at the memory.  What the hell was he supposed to learn out here, on his own?  Did wolves even do that, learning by themselves?  "Met a few wolves.  Boring wolves.  I thought you said the mountain was special, or something."

#R28-9

@Gilligan
Hunted a squirrel? He restrained his disappointment, allowing only a twitch of his precious metal tail. This was hardly worth remembering, let alone mentioning. It appeared his son truly had just been gallivanting around the country side. Surely it was some comfort that he hadn't starved to death, but the fact that the squirrel was all he had to talk about indicated that that might have been all he had eaten. Datura shook is head, his brow creased. Perhaps he should have just gone after him after Gilligan had thrown that unsightly temper tantrum about his father's roughness. Though, there was really no way Datura would have broken his neck.

Maybe.

"It is," he grumbled. He did not want to be cross with the boy, but he disagreed whole-heartedly with the mood this boy was in. "This is where I'm from." For a moment he felt a familiar stirring in his chest that felt an awful lot like guilt. He did not mean to sound like he was in love with the land, that he was tied with this piece of the earth specifically, for he didn't believe in any of that pagan nonsense. He felt for the land as he felt for his son: something he had claimed, something he owned. This land was something he had pissed all over in his boyhood and thus, it was just his in the best way that he could understand it.

"I mean," he amended abruptly, "Not here really. Father south than this." And farther south still than the old lands his mother's memory haunted. No, he intended to go all the way to the nightshade bushes that wrapped around the lake. To Poison Path. "But what exactly is it that you expect? A mountain is a mountain is a mountain." He found himself repeating words he had said once long ago, maybe it had been a dream... a painful dream about a girl.

"What made these wolves boring" He inquired suddenly, diving back into the middle of his son's whimperings. They might have been boring, but what about who they were, where they lived. There was always value in that, even if the value wasn't inherent in the wolf itself.

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"Oh!"
 
South of here, why hadn't Datura just said so?  The ginger wouldn't have spent his time scouting around the harsh incline if he'd known this wasn't even the place his father held so dear.  It had been built in his mind, imagination taking hold of whatever stories his father had told him and blowing them up to epic proportions.  In truth, the lad had probably set himself up for disappointment – but how could he not be hopeful?  The golden god had dragged him from the home he'd been vey happy in all the way to this forest – it could only be for a good reason.
 
It had to be for a good reason.
 
Fortunately, the patriarch was a master of diverting Gilligan's shortlived attention and the matter of home and pack were quickly dismissed as he was instructed to reflect back upon the wolves he'd met before his father had arrived.  "Well, I met one older female – she really liked my star, yo!  Liked it a lot."  'Because it's fucking handsome,' the yearling didn't add.  But outside of that?  "She just…didn't say a lot.  I dunno.  Uppity, and shit.  There was another one but…"  A single shoulder shrug, and the boy slowly hauled himself up to his feet.  It was the same old story – a little bit of small talk, or not, but they had nothing interesting to say and no adventures to go on.
 
Iopah was quickly dismissed from his mind as he gazed off into the horizon, direction generally south.  "So…yo, are we gonna go south than?  To your home?"

#R28-9

There is a moose carcass that has been scavenged by coyotes nearby. +15 Health

@Gilligan btw there's some broken code in your profile. can't stalk your threadlog :CCCC

Usually the man was not so prickly. His son was a bit of a reckless hooligan who, at times, made him groan. More than once Datura had been forced up against a tree, trying to massage out the headache the teen left him with. But these times had been sparing. Maybe it was just that Gilligan was growing up more, becoming his own person — in many ways that Datura didn't agree with — maybe it was the fact that they had quarreled recently, and maybe it was just that Datura had spent a dangerous amount of time on his own, but every time Gilligan opened his mouth he stiffened reflexively. 

A woman?

Datura knew the cause of this headache, though. He himself had basically hopped into bed with the first biologicall unrelated woman he had encountered. They had been childhood friends. Circumstances that he hated to relive mentally had bound them together. He had needed her in the most unhealthy way. And out of this unhealthy need a weakling and a dead thing had been born. In reality, Datura did not know about the dead thing. But a weakling son was really all the bad omens one needed. Grizzly Hollow, at least as Taima saw it, was a doomed path. Datura wanted to get off the rollercoaster before it crashed into the ground. He could not be a part of her sinking legacy. Nor did he want his son to end up that way: eaten alive by lust and tied down by a woman and some babes before he even had the chance to experience the world. He didn't want some no good hussy flirting with his son about his stupid "star." He pursed his lips and stared hard at the boy. At least he had said she was boring. He sure as hell hoped his son wasn't interested in any of the floozies around this part. Maybe it was time to have the talk with him. "You gotta be careful with women, son. They all just want one thing." He made no attempt to elaborate on this "thing" just yet. Perhaps Gilligan already knew. 

Some one should have given Datura the talk. That would have saved a lot of pain.

Maybe.

"Mmmm," he grunted in response as his son's nose turned southward. "Last I knew there was still a pack living down there. Poison Path. Lead by a woman named Athena." The "mother" of his sister. He wondered if any of the nightshade wolves were still around. They had been a resilient bunch, even when Nomad's Pass stood to tear everything they loved away from them. There was something admirable in that, though Datura could never muster anything beyond this begrudging acknowledgement. He had and very much still hated everything that they stood for. But a journey south would tell him whether they were really as strong as memory had served.  

(This post was last modified: Jul 26, 2015, 03:00 AM by Datura.)

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It would be of great relief for Datura to know that his son currently had no interest in the fairer sex – at least, not for the purpose that the man feared.  Wolves were wolves, as far as he was concerned, and the youth was equally as interested in meeting males as he was a female.  Of course, he had little control over his body's response to the hormones a dame might release, but to date, it was a problem that had not plagued the yearling.  When the golden giant eluded to that very problem, he was met with only a blank stare, the youth tipping his head to one side.  "Want what?  What do women want?" he asked, brow furrowing.  As far as he could recall, the woman he spoke with hadn't asked him for anything, only questions about him.
 
Was it a trick?
 
The idea was all very puzzling, the boy thought, still furrowing his brow as he reflected back.  He would have to probe the Aquila patriarch further – for now, their collective had turned southward.  His tail thumped against the ground at the idea of further adventure, a low hum in the teen's throat as he gave a small nod.  "Athena," he parroted, committing the name to memory.  If he found this woman, or Poison Path, he would be sure to report it back to his leader.  "What was it like?" Gilligan inquired, the sour mood dissipating as frustration and disappointment were replaced by curiosity and the thirst for adventure.  "Can we go see it?  Do you think they remember you?  Maybe there are wolves my age!"

Ack!  Thanks for letting me know.  Went in and fixed it this morning.  Forgot to close one wee little tag, and look what it did.

#R28-9

@Gilligan

Maybe it wasn't surprising that Gilligan looked at him so quizzically. Datura's golden eyes searched the yearling's face for any sign of a lie but found none. Gilligan had never been a great liar when he was young, but Datura could never be sure if he was getting any better at it. Subtleties were so often lost on the golden man that he could only compensate by starting at the assumption that everyone was lying to him. But Gilligan was only a year old. He had never been alive to smell the scent of a woman in heat, hear them all crying out to be held and tempting every man in a four mile radius. He would know soon, in the coming months. But otherwise they all hid it well. They acted completely sane three out of four seasons. He shook his head, "They just want to own you," to what end, it was hard for him to explain. He didn't full understand it himself. "You just gotta be careful is all I'm saying."

Athena. There were other names that belonged to the wolves of Poison Path, but he struggled to think of any besides Ava... his own surrogate mother that had snuggled him at night and then wordlessly disappeared. A wolf in sheep's clothing. The circumstances surrounding his own birth were still murky and confusing to him. Because he understood that his blood parents had run away at an early age, but no one had told him why. And certainly no one told him why he and Belladonna had been split. Why he was the one unloved. Why his new mother had to run away. Belladonna had gotten a new mother and father, a luxury that had been withheld along with every other affection afforded to his late sister. These bitter memories had been silent for a long time, but he found all the old emotions seeping back into his heart. It was unfair. It was so unfair.

No one had even given him a chance.

"It was horrible," he grunted. He wanted to make them pay for it. He wanted someone's apology. "And I wouldn't get your hopes up. Packs in this land rise and fall like the sun. This used to be some pack's den." Datura tested his tongue for the name of it, but found it was harder than he thought to remember the legends of his youth. "Something Plateau I think. No one knows what happened to them."

(This post was last modified: Jul 26, 2015, 06:37 PM by Datura. Edit Reason: editted to make dialogue more datura-like :x )

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