Sex: FemaleThe frustration seemed to well at a constant pace. The more she tried the more it seemed she was led around in circles, chasing her own tail when she should have been hunting her only living son. Each time she spoke the name aloud her body shuddered with disgust. Kjors. Even to think of it made her cringe, but she was as determined now as ever, knowing he was somewhere nearby. Suspecting rather, given that she'd heard little in her efforts to find out where he lingered. Perhaps the odd little male that had sold him out had gone back and convinced him to flee. Dark clouds lingered overhead, threatening snow or rain. Winter was slowly rolling in, and if she knew anything it was that she faced a risk trying to survive on her own, but she would have rather died than depend entirely on someone else. She was no subordinate - she never had been. The life of power was something she had held for too long. Having it stripped away from her changed nothing. She would either rule the world of her own free will, or damn well die trying. So much travelling - or was it mindless wandering? South. North. South again. She was gradually familiarising with the lands, and though at times she questioned her memory, she managed to recall the location of the marsh. It was far from the most ideal place to stop and settle for a drink, but if she was going to be trekking back to the north for another shot at finding Kjors, she'd have to go for some time without stopping. For the longest time her head was down, eyes closed as her tongue lapped at the questionable waters of the marsh. There was definitely something interested about the taste, and she almost hoped it might intoxicate her just enough that she would close her eyes and magically wake up wherever she wanted to be, but at her age and experience, she wagered she'd have to drink the entire marsh to get even close... |
Water, always with the water, Kjell thought begrudgingly. As pleased as he was to shack up near a fresh source of water, he’d little idea that he would be surrounded by a veritable inland sea. Moving north to the cedar wood forest had eventually run him into Cut Rock River. A little more eastward (and moving north once more), and he’d run into the marsh – this came with considerable more mud, and the male was seriously considering rerouting and returning to the lagoon (and his lovely @Bishop) to wash himself off. The weather was cold, the water was colder, and if he thought he was going to make a kill, he’d been mistaken.
Exhaling sharply, he turned about, planning on putting this thought into action when a specter caught his eye. The gold-eyed wolf stopped dead in his tracks, pointed ears pressed forward as he took in the familiar form. His plumed tail rose upwards, flagging over his back as he widened his stance. If he wasn’t so shocked to see a ghost from his past, the man might have bothered to be a bit angry with her. There was no doubt in his mind who this was. The woman who raised him. The woman who left him for dead.
“Y’aged well, huh?”
For many months since she had first fled from Kjors, he mind had been haunted by the memories of all that she had once had, and all that she had lost. The power and the fame, they were all things she could do without, meaningless titles that ultimately had little standing on how well she was equipped to survive. Already she had proven her point, living to this age without any permanent kind of assistance, where others of the same group were slain in their tracks for posing a threat to younger and so-called 'more capable' young leaders. The power and the fame were secondary to her pride and her joy, personified by the son whose blood had soaked Kjors' pelt that same day the sickly boy had forced her to flee. Kjell - the one overlooked by Søren as the favoured heir. The smarter, stronger, more capable king that never was, and never had his chance to be. The ghost of her dreams and the victim of her nightmares, whose face had kept her awake and helped her sleep. The slain dragon prince whose voice was slick and-- and suddenly singing in her ears. Her neck almost snapped as it whipped from the marsh, head turning with wide eyes before her ears had a chance, and in one split-second it felt like someone had reached into her throat and pulled all the air from her lungs. Every muscle tightened with a burning ferocity, and she found she was frozen. Stuck in the mud. Unable to move. Like she'd just seen a ghost. Hitching a breath, pulling in just enough breath to be able to push forward one solitary whispered word. "Kjell..." This was a dream - it had to be, only she couldn't remember falling asleep. She had to be drunk, but her head wasn't spinning. Perhaps, and it was by far the most likely, she had died in her sleep and was yet to realise that she had regained consciousness in hell. "This... this cannot be..." Breathless through each syllable as she urged herself to inch forward only to fail on quivering legs. Eyes narrowed, sceptical and blurred by the onset of tears that brimmed in the corners of her eyes. A dream, a nightmare, or some kind of a prank. One way or another, it was cruelty. This man that stood before her, this boy, had long been dead. "My son..." and still in her eyes, dead or alive or stuck somewhere in between, he was still the only true son she had ever birthed "...you're... you're dead." |
“Suuuurpriiiise~”Kjell sang, devilish glee glinting in his molten gold eyes.
How long he’d wanted to say that – how long he’d wanted to confront the family that had left him to bleed across the stone not far from his father’s rotting corpse. That Kjors tried to kill him wasn’t a complete surprise – their parents had bred a rivalry between the boys, with their father favoring his first-born with foolish sentimentality, and their mother favoring her youngest, as dams were so prone to doing. That the younger dragon prince himself thought he’d be a fine heir and a much better ruler of Ered Luin was besides the point. His chance had never come. If not for Valdis, he would have exsanguinated where he lay. As it were, he wore a collar of scars about his neck and shoulder now, only disguised by his thickening winter coat.
All in all, he offered the woman a wild smile. It was not very different from something his sibling would wear (and perhaps he’d be quite dismayed if he had any idea). Something wicked sung in the way he held his head, arrogant and proud, balancing a crown of beauty and wit upon his head. With or without his pack, his family, Kjell Sørenson had grown into the very picture of alpha male. Now that he was traveling with Bishop, all that remained was founding an actual pack. Provided the pair wintered alright, he would consider it – that he’d yet to secure his beautiful little treasure was the more immediate issue.
That the woman who abandoned him had somehow found him, miles and miles from their former pack grounds, was the most immediate issue at hand. What did she want?
“Ah ain’t. No thanks t’ you, though. Tha’ plan went spectacularly poorly, huh? Kjors was spittin’ mad – seems y’went alright, though. Can’t much same th’ same, but hey, if y’can kill one, why not leave th’ other, right?”
The sound of his voice... now that she had looked and actually confirmed what she had thought... was not as pleasant as one might have thought. Worsened still by the fact that he all but sung out at her, sounding something like a taunt or a challenge, and doing little to dispel the idea that she had been confronted by a ghost. Surely this was a dream - a hallucination, a subject of her ageing imagination. Anything! She would have taken anything to make the explanation easier, to make it more sensible. If it meant admitting that she was getting old she would have leapt on the chance. It was all too real. The sight, the scent, the clarity of everything that surrounded and overwhelmed her. The longer she should, the more that he talked, the more she was forced to face the facts. The son she had lost - who she had seen dead on the ground at mercy of Kjors just seconds before she made her own escape, had dug out of his grave. He was alive. Somehow. It was almost sickening. "You were... I was..." so rare it was for her to be tripped up by her tongue. "I saw you. Dead." Clearly she had been mistaken at the time. "Kjors was... and the blood... you weren't breathing... he..." She had to relive the moment, to be sure that what she could recall was the truth being spoken now, and it was not an easy thing to look back at. "Kjell... son... I swear... if I had known..." usually sturdy legs were on the verge of buckling, quaking as a usually concrete woman started to crumble at the edges, tears of disbelief and pain as she was apparently blinded to the displeasure of the boy - the man who was understandably upset given his take on what had happened in the past. All this time and her pain was without purpose. The realisation was shocking. |
“Thought we just went over this,” Kjell sighed, quickly losing patience for the woman’s shock at her discovery. Not dead – damn close, but not actually dead. There was plenty of blood, and his older brother had done quite the job on his neck and chest. Were he in his summer coat, lighter and less thick, the puzzle of scars littering that part of his frame would be obvious. Even now, shaggy and layered with a heavy undercoat, the fur on his neck grew in at weird angles where the thick scarring didn’t allow new growth. Fortunately, the most of that was covered by the longer hair above and around the old wounds, and he looked, more or less, like the picture of health where he stood several paces away from his mother.
That Avari made no attempt to close the gap was not lost on him.
One hind leg cocked as he relaxed, feeling under no threat from the woman. In fact, she seemed to be crumbling before his very eyes – where his heart squeezed to see her collapse, he steeled himself. “Yeah, yeah, if you’d known, if he’d known.” Kjell rolled his shoulders in a casual shrug, refusing to be swayed by the emotional outburst. “Y’ didn’t. You could thank Valdis for me but, eh. No idea where she’s at, now. Or if she’s even still alive. We split ways.” The man tipped his head to one side, wondering briefly if the medic was still with her mate – if she had pups, or…well, there was one thousand ‘what ifs’, but he was desultory. He was avoiding the problem at hand.
“…so. Where’s tha’ leave us, huh? ‘Cos it’s been what…three years, now? Kinda got on, on my own.”
"Kjell..." she repeated his name again, still in disbelief that what she was seeing was even real. It was real though, it had to be. The longer she looked the more she was convinced, and it was that which brought her just one step closer on quaking legs. If she could only touch him to be sure that her nose would not pass through his figure...
"Oh if I ever meet this Valdis, she will have my eternal gratitude." Another step, but the distance between them seemed to grow ever further as she stared. "Three years." Her repetition confirmed his questions. "Three painful... empty years." Some unseen inner strength took her closer, the distance now reduced to no more than a few feet.
"My son..." seeing clearly into his eyes at such close range brought a renewal of glistening tears to her own "...every night I mourned for you. Every morning. Every day. I wished to have you back." For once she actually wasn't lying. This boy - this man had been her pride and joy, flesh and blood and sweat and tears.
"Now... now you're here." It still seemed so surreal, and she feared in the pit of her chest that she would wake to a sound and find that the whole thing had been a figment of some vivid hallucination. "You wouldn't... you wouldn't take that away from me.. again?" Uncertain in her voice, but she was confident in her soul. She hadn't raised a son to turn his back on his own mother. Surely, no matter how enraged he was.
"Son... my heart will not recover from losing you again."
“Consider yer wish granted, then,” Kjell sighed, some of the vindictive nature sucked out of him as the woman slithered closer. She was the wolf who had raised him, after all, and as a pup, he truly wanted for naught. Her attention, her knowledge, her love, he had it all, and not once did he have to battle his older brother for it. Their father was another story all together, but Søren did care for the boy, and did see him educated as any prince of Ered Luin ought to be. It wasn’t the man’s fault, really, that he’d been betting on the wrong horse. Besides, he was dead, and at a rival’s paw. It looked poorly upon a man to think ill of the deceased.
She drew a slow sigh from him, but no more words, even as she made her plea – as close to a plea as Avari ever came, at least. He tipped his head and studied her face for a moment…and then he cave, thrusting his nose into her space as he reached forward to brush their muzzles together. “No,” he eventually sighed, shaking his head as he withdrew. “No, I wouldn’t.”
Still a mother’s boy, it seemed, even years after her perceived betrayal. That he wouldn’t break her heart didn’t imply he wasn’t still quite irritated, but no, she wasn’t the one who’d tried to kill him. Kjell supposed she had already been punished enough for her crime. “So, you livin’ here, now? ‘Cos I only jes’ came. Was gonna settle down for the winter, and see where to go after that…”
One could not put into words the utter gratulation that started in her chest as she watched her son's cold exterior break away to reveal the emotions hiding underneath. No, leaving him to die at Kjors mercy had not been an easy choice, but she had relived it a thousand times. For him to have done the same again, to have turned and walked away and never have returned might have been the end of her. The hunt for Kjors would have come to an end with no-one to avenge. She'd have found a hole in which to curl up and die knowing the one thing she took more proudly than anything else - being a mother to the ever capable Kjell, had been an utter failure all this time. Instead it was a dream come true, his coming into her space with a physical touch that put the final stitches in the seam of her confirming he was real, and her breath hitched as the butterflies in her stomach morphed into hummingbirds, skin feeling progressively warmer beneath a thickening coat as she returned the gesture, and nothing more. Pushing her luck was not in her best interests. Clearly, despite his change in attitude, he was still harbouring frustrations, and while they caused her heart to burn she could not find it in her to dare hold it against him. She would not have been her son if he'd reacted any other way. Full of questions, it seemed that the conversation was already moving on. The reunion a short one, straight to business, the way she had always been clearly not lost in her genetics. "Mmm." She hummed in that thoughtful way that only a mother could. "Living, but not settled." All manner of directions, all looking for Kjors, but she kept that under wraps for the time being. She wished not to have her moment spoiled by uttering the name of that pathetic runt of a child. That was far better left for a less emotional moment. "The winter will be cruel. It's not worth the risk to walk alone." Yet that was exactly what she had been doing for some months and years, bouncing between worlds in search of peace. Instead she had found something closer to war, but it was not in her to talk such macabre things with her favoured child. There were other matters, other scents to press upon in a subtle yet overt way all the same. "I don't imagine you would be here alone..." not her son. Not her wonderful, handsome Kjell. |
