Spectral Woods swimming through stone

@Sahalie If anyone else wants to join PM me/Sarah first please :)
RE:You've discovered an orchard of apples! The ones on the ground have fermented and you start to feel a little tipsy!
Late afternoon/early evening, west of OTB.

From Spieden's jaws dangled a hefty salmon, it's ruddy tail tucked behind her fangs and olive green head bumping the leafy ground with each step. The cool autumn weather was perfect for a jaunt up to the mountains, both in keeping Spieden cool through her thickening winter coat and slowing the decay of her fishy present. The salmon run had been so successful this year that even Spieden's voracious appetite couldn't keep up with how much they had stowed away. Wondering what the hell they were going to do with all the fish before it started to rot and stink up the caches, Spieden remembered an agreement that Triell had arranged between them and the mountain wolves. Spieden wasn't much of a diplomat and was skeptical of whether the Bend would ever see anything in return from the alliance with Fallen Tree Cove, but it couldn't hurt to buy some goodwill with food the Bend wouldn't miss anyhow.

She had invited Sahalie along, enjoying the company of someone at her side, or the few stolen words of conversation when they paused for rest and Spieden could set down her burden. Of all the pack, she found herself most comfortable around the charcoal coated girl. It shouldn't have been surprising given she'd raised her practically from birth, but the memory of the first tense months spoke to how far things had come, step by step.

The sun was nearing the mountainous horizon when the pair came across a grove of trees, their leaves mostly missing much like the rest of the surrounding wood. A tantalizing sweet scent was apparent over the lingering musk of the fish under her nose. Spieden grunted, a wordless indication of nothing in particular to Sahalie as she trotted into the trees, tail flicking. Carefully Spieden set the fish down against a trunk, her nose immediately set to riffling through the tall golden grass. "-fruit around here somewhere..." She mumbled.

Spieden made a pleased chuff upon finding a dozens of apples scattered beneath a tree. She popped the first one into her mouth without hesitation, pausing at the soft texture and bitter tang. Still, it wasn't too bad, and food was food. The rotund woman quickly set to hoovering up the rest of the squishy fruits.

how i envy the herrings

Spieden Coho

always on their way 

(This post was last modified: Oct 25, 2015, 09:32 PM by Spieden.)

Her paws carried her father off the ground than was necessary, as she frolicked and skipped along with her caretaker. More often than not Sahalie would hang back to smell things, bound forward to smell more things. Spieden carried on at more or less an even pace. If Sahalie had been wise she would have taken a leaf out of her book. The last time they had gone on an extended trip together they had to stop very often since the cub had tired herself out with sheer excitement. And this trip seemed to be shaping up much the same way.

But they were going to meet another pack. It was impossible for the girl to still her frantic heart. At every bend in the path she wondered if the trees would carry a different scent. The mountains had been their goal, and Sahalie had prattled on at length about the girl, @Kyna, that she had met who said she lived on the mountains and how cool Kyna was. She was in for quite the surprise when it would become clear that Kyna did not live in the pack she was headed towards. But blissfully she continued on to their goal. In her mouth, too, she carried salmon. It was much dirtier than Spieden's salmon, however, because of how many times she had to put it down in order to sniff things.

It surprised the young girl when, for once, it was not herself making the pit stop.

"Spieden...Spieden what are you doing?"

With a mixture of horror and awe the girl watched the large black woman suck up bulb after bulb of fruit. The fish sloughed out of Sahalie's mouth. The piscine smell was not so strong now, and she could smell a completely different kind of smell that over powered her. "Spieden what are those?" 

Spieden had just about cleaned out all the apples from the underside of her particular tree when Sahalie asked what they were. Broken from her ravenous reverie, Spieden blinked, lifting her head up from the cover of the tall grass and licking the sticky sweet juice from her greyed lips. "Apples. They grow on the trees here. These are a little old, been sitting on the ground too long. Not too bad though," She answered matter-of-factly. As if disagreeing with her own assessment of "not too bad", her stomach made a dissenting audible grumble and her face twisted with slight discomfort. "Mmhh, maybe a little bad." She admitted. Her stomach felt like it was doing wobbly backflips in her gut, but remembering how she'd traumatized Serach before, she was determined to keep her lunch down for Sahalie's sake.

"Should probably keep going though. We can find somewhere to stop for the night," Spieden said as she ambled back towards her fish, again grabbing it by the tail and hoisting it into the air. She waited for Sahalie before setting off again at her steady pace, continuing through the orchard. It was subtle at first, so much so that she didn't notice it at first. Slowly her path would veer towards one side, then the other, heavy ashen paws flopping careless of where they landed. Despite the crisp air, she felt pleasantly warm, as if her fermented apple core was radiating some sort of heat of its own.

how i envy the herrings

Spieden Coho

always on their way

(This post was last modified: Oct 27, 2015, 02:01 AM by Spieden.)

A young deer has been separated from the rest of its herd. Hunt Opportunity

Her eyebrows came together at the strange, angry sound Spieden's belly made. "I think maybe a lot bad..." she sneered through her wrinkled snout. "Do apples normally smell like this?" Looking at the things on the ground she recalled seeing these things in the trees before. How strange it was to find them on the ground now in droves. Apparently they were safe to eat, but Sahalie was not so sure they were meant to be eaten when they were like this. It was kinda like when meat went bad...only the smell was a lot less sour and much more...airy and full of color. But in a distinctly unpleasant way. Awkwardly she nibbled on one, but immediately withdrew from the bitterness that assaulted her tongue.

She would leave the apples to Spieden. 

Sahalie was getting better at picking up the fish. The first few times she had let it slip straight through her jaws, unsure of where to carry it. And she had tried to emulate the clever toss that Spieden could do so nonchalantly. The fish had just fallen to the ground. Now she held it by the puncture she had worn through it's eyeball socket. It was a good a place as any, and with most of the fish hanging outside her mouth it allowed her to talk still. Since Sahalie desperately loved to talk.

When her caretaker started to veer in weird directions on the path, Sahalie's head turned. Now Spieden was swinging back, nearly bumping into Sahalie had the girl not jumped to her right just in time. "Spieden... what's gotten into you?"

@Sahalie

Spieden hiccuped, swallowing back the warm appley tide that surged to and fro in her belly with each step. "Rhmm? Nuffngsh goppem imma mee." She mumbled around the fish held firmly in her mouth, not noticing that with it in the way she was all but unintelligible. Her swaying stagger brought her out of the orchard into the thickening wood, the remnants of what little sunlight lingered swallowed by the trees, exchanged for the soft pale light of a waning gibbous moon. Spieden squinted, her head spinning and unable to keep her bearings. The darkness only seemed to make her disorientation worse, and just keeping her paws going one in front of the other, nevermind a straight line, was getting to be a struggle.

"Oh man... Oh. Oh man." She said, the fish sliding out of her mouth onto the ground. She stopped, body rocking one way and the next before her balance was completely undone. Her hind legs buckled and her ample rear slammed into the ground with a thud. "I jus' need a sit down. Yeah. I jus' need to sit down is all. Mmhmm. Jussit down." She slurred to Sahalie, head swinging towards the girl in an exaggerated fashion.

 

how i envy the herrings

Spieden Coho

always on their way

(This post was last modified: Dec 06, 2015, 05:06 AM by Spieden.)

Sahalie's fish fell to the ground again, her lower jaw hanging limply. This was not how Spieden talked. Surely, she the gait of her words had always been a little awkward, as if she could never quite find a cadence that suited her -- much like the gait of her stride in her large frame-- but it had never been the sounds themselves that had sounded confused. Sahalie blinked, hesitantly picking up the fish and following the older woman, squinting to find the cause of this uncharacteristic behavior.

When her once-stoic all-dark, began to excitedly, uneasily call out and begin to sway, the young girl was so taken by her own surprise that she did nothing but watch her caretaker's legs betray her without reason. "Spieden!" The girl cried, racing to the woman's side in an instant, her heart buzzing with anxiety. "Yeah...yeah let's just...sit down," she parroted with a strained voice, hoping the Spieden would stop throwing her head around so violently. She was bound to make herself sick. "Don't move so much." Spieden may have insisted that nothing had gotten into her, but Sahalie was not convinced at all. 'Nothing' didn't bring a strong, healthy leader of Oak Tree Bend to her ass when she had been trotting along like her normal self only twenty minutes ago. This was... very wrong.

Like a flash from a firefly, an idea sparked in the girl's mind. "The apples!" she nearly shouted, her face quite close to Spieden's. "Spieden I think... I think those apples are making you...." Her head tilted as she considered the woman, the corners of her lips tugging uncertainly, "like this..."

She wondered if now would be a good time. A good time for something Sahalie had not even allowed herself to think after all these months of awkward, uncomfortable interactions. She bit her lip. Should She? 

@Sahalie A wild mushroom appears :o

A little twittering at her shoulder caught her attention. Any other time the worry in Sahalie's voice would have caught the Coho's attention, but at the moment it barely registered. Spieden settled down, paws sliding forward until her elbows hit the ground, her tongue flapping in the cool air as she panted.

Spieden blinked, her heavy head swinging with more force than necessary to look at the girl. Or rather, girls. She squinted, brow furrowed as the illusion of two Sahalie's steadily resolved into one with a little more focus. Suddenly Sahalie's snout was right in front of her, and while Spieden flinched at the volume of the young Tainn's voice she otherwise didn't budge.

"Mmmph." Spieden grunted, acknowledging Sahalie's theory. "Yanno, might be onta somethin'. Wouldn't be th' worss thingta happen, though." She'd suffered all sorts of unpleasant side effects from her voraciously undiscerning appetite. While this episode was certainly novel, it was no where near the worst gastrointestinal suffering she had endured. One really should not trifle with spoiled seafood. "Gotta stop eatin' shit." She said with a wince, more a mental note to herself.

Again Spieden squinted, this time off the side of Sahalie's shoulder. Soft pinpricks of light revealed themselves in the falling darkness, seemingly shimmering and dancing in her apple-addled vision. "Hmmph, don't usually see fireflies this time 'f year." She noted, lips quirking curiously.

how i envy the herrings

Spieden Coho

always on their way

so I realize now that Serach actually sorta let the cat out of the bag here so I guess Sahalie has everything she needs to...ask away

Her eyes widened and her brows moved up and down, left one and then the right one peaking repeatedly as Spieden's expression changed slowly, yet she flinched and moved so quickly. Everything seemed to contradict itself. Sahalie wasn't quite so sure that this wasn't the Worst Thing to Happen, but really, what did she know about Spieden's life? There were marks all over the woman. Marks over everyone's body save her own. She gulped, feeling the temptation to speak her mind, to just say something for once in her life, burn stronger in her heart.

Normally Spieden did not swear in front of her, and Sahalie's eyes bulged dangerously at the cavalier utterance of the bad version of poop. Should she say something? Would Spieden even notice if she did? The woman probably didn't have any idea what she was even saying... The older woman began to mumble things about fireflies, and Sahalie was left to conclude that, yep, Spieden was 100000% out of her mind. Should she laugh? She felt like laughing. But also she wanted to cry.

She prodded gently at first. "Spieden. Why did Fenru ask if you were "with" my dad? " Her heart hammered anxiously between her ribs. As she had gotten older she had begun to think more on what Anna had said about kings and queens and the throne, and she realized there was some implications about them being together, obviously, otherwise Fenru would have had no reason to say anything like that. She held on to her trump card, though, not really even sure what to do with it. At any rate, this question was still worth asking, maybe. Maybe Spieden was the reason Nayeli was gone. Maybe she had something to do with it. Maybe she was with her father. @Serach hadn't said, explicitly, that Spieden was not.

If she was with Triell? Spieden tipped her head back, a hearty laugh bellowing forth from her lungs. "Ohhhoho, did 'e now?" She asked once the guffaws were somewhat under control. Truly it was a humorous thought to her. Triell was fine as far as men could go, but there was really nothing appealing to her about men as a whole.

She shook her head, still chuckling. "I s'pose it'd look that way, wouldn't it?" She asked no one in particular. "We're kind of a funny pack, yeah?" Spieden posed as a rhetorical, grinning amusedly at the girl before realizing that this was Sahalie's only pack. Spieden had grown up in a pack where her parents had lead, and after that even Lila had her mate beside her. But Spieden realized as far as Sahalie knew, the current situation probably seemed 'normal' to her.

The beaming grin on Spieden's face settled to something slightly more serious but nonetheless unfocused. "Us'lly there's the two leaders, a male, a female, they love each other enough to be together. Well, I'm leadin', and yer dad's leadin', or was, is, whatever, but we ain't together." Spieden explained.

"So 'f course he's gonna ask if we're a pair. Fenru prob'ly couldn't believe yer dad landed quite the catch, huh?" She asked, the grin returning with a swish of her tail.

how i envy the herrings

Spieden Coho

always on their way