Fireweed Rise lift up my eyes

For @Adelaide =)

Japheth's long legs carried him to the peak of a hill that was blanketed in a sparse layer of snow. The tall dead stalks of weeds, bent and often broken, leant the place a stark appearance, though he supposed it would be a meadow of tall grasses come summer. The tawny male snorted softly at the thought of summer, wondering if he would still be in these parts in the warmer months. The area was vast and sheltered by the mountains, but thus far he had found the place to be as cold and lonely as any other he had traversed along the way from Eagle Ridge. Nothing compelled him to stay.

And yet he had not left; he lingered in this wilderness, perhaps for the thought that the weather might improve in this region sooner than further north, perhaps for the potential of bountiful prey when spring finally came, perhaps because he was tired of walking endlessly without purpose. He had not missed the scents of nearby packs carried to him on the cold wind, but he had no yet gained the courage to approach their borders, and he had yet to run into anyone outside those boundary lines.

Eventually he would have to either muster up the guts to petition a pack for a place to stay, or get up the determination to continue on in his journey. For now, he simply seated himself and overlooked the surrounding forest bathed in early morning sunlight, and sighed, the beauty of the late winter day lost to his teenaged angst.

Adelaide strayed from her home and quickly found herself back where she'd started. It looked much different now than it had weeks ago, when the snows were still falling. Now there was a thin sheet that hardly reached her ankles, though she could feel the earth beneath squelching. Everything, and yet nothing, had changed, but here she stood, certain that this was were she had thought she'd found her end. But life had gone on, and for the better. With her head low, the agouti woman scoured the slowly appearing earth for new shoots. It was not particularly warm, but the sun was out and life would give way soon. And although she could not pick the shoots, she could, at the very least, remember where they were and come back to pick them later.

There were a few oddities along the ground and she stored their location away in her mind. She tested the air continuously, trying to pick out each earthy scent for ones that would benefit her, but instead was hit rather bluntly with the scent of a stranger. Brows furrowed, she looked around, wondering how she had not noticed him before. Many yards away, the stranger rested on the brink of a hill, the very same she had just come down, though had found herself cloaked by some helpful trees. From this distance, she could not make out much but his shape, perhaps betraying that he was young, but perhaps it was some trick of the fading light. The social woman teetered between seeking him out and leaving him to his own. It took a bit of deliberation for Adelaide to go back to her work, though his distant shape still lingered in the back of her mind.

(This post was last modified: Apr 04, 2014, 09:17 PM by Adelaide.)

Lurking until the end of July - Please PM/tag me to get my attention

The moment stretched out, long and expectant. Japheth's fur stiffened faintly, for he had the most curious sensation that something was going to happen, something to break the monotony of long days of travel in cold weather. Yet the only thing to occur out of the ordinary was a particularly insistent gust of wind that seemed to push at his back, rippling his perpetually-unkempt fur and making it unrulier still. The breeze quieted down, and again the hilltop was silent, calm, and uneventful. The hairs at the nape of Japheth's neck smoothed down just slightly as his moment of anticipation faded, and with a small measure of disappointment he decided to let the wind have its way and began to trail down the hill and into yet another spread of trees.

Sunlight dappled his tawny back as he meandered between tree trunks. As he stumbled on not one, not two, but three different bundles of gnarled roots, Japheth cursed his clumsiness. He half-wished he'd taken Coll up on the offer of some kind of battle training, if it might have trained some manner of poise into his wayward adolescent musculature, but even now the thought of violence, even a mock-fight, made him scrunch up his nose in distaste. Reluctantly, he had to admit there might be some good justification for fighting in this world, but neither Eagle Ridge nor Snake Creek could lay claim to noble reasons. They simply fought for the hell of it, whatever their ancestors' causus belli had been. Where had they lost their logic and reason? It was surely drowned in blood, somewhere along the way.

Such thoughts dwelled in the young man's mind, but were quickly set aside when the faint movement of another became visible through the trees. Japheth's ears swivelled forward to catch the sound of footfalls, and his nose twitched; the breeze still flowed away from him, but gently enough that he could still catch a hint of femininity within. His tail, which had begun to sway faintly with the thought of meeting another, lowered, and he dipped his head, nervousness flicking his ears backwards even as he approached her. A thin ring of white showed around yellow irises as he glanced anywhere but at her. Females were a nearly-unknown quantity; his father, having only two girls and no idea of how to raise them, had bundled them off to an aunt in a pack some two days' travel from Eagle Ridge after their mother's fateful disappearance. There'd been other girl-pups, but they'd been too enamored of his warrior brothers to pay any mind to the quiet and scholarly boy who was too snooty to stage mock-compaigns with his agemates.

Yet despite Japheth's woman-induced sheepishness, this particular female was the first canine he'd encountered in many days, and so he stammered out, in a cracking voice, "Hello." He quickly wished he hadn't, for he could then have crouched down and shuffled on past the lady without disturbing her or setting his nerves a-frazzled, but alas, he'd had no such good sense, and so he could only shrink himself a bit closer to the ground and hope she would be merciful and do most of the talking for the both of them.

(This post was last modified: Apr 12, 2014, 03:42 AM by Japheth.)

Adelaide might have truly left him be if not for his voice calling out to her from upon the hill. She, herself, had ended up closer to the rise as she resumed her herbal hunt, and easily heard his cracked, youthful tones from on high. In that moment, Adelaide found herself an effloresce of action. Anyway, maybe up where he was, she might find something of interest. Pulling herself up the hillside, she paused for a breath at the top, a few yards away from the male, finding that the hill had been a mite steeper than she'd thought. Ears twitched as she recovered, lifting her head to see him, yellow-eyed and all, looking rather sheepish. "Hello to you, too," She greeted him with heavily accented tones. Her ears flipped back in her own embarrassed manner, tail waved at her back.

"I must say, I saw you up here, but I was quite engaged in searching for herbs." She stretched her neck out and smile, nose twitching to capture his scent. It was not familiar, though he looked young. Perhaps he was a yearling from these lands, just left his home. Though she might have expected a child to look a bit more confident upon familiar terrain. "I am Adelaide Belrose, monsieur. Are you from these lands?" She prattled on, though her voice would not lend itself to make her constant speech an annoyance. Adelaide spoke clearly, confidently, with pauses where there ought to be pauses, so as not to assault the ears. Perhaps she did not have a title to truly speak of, but in all aspects, Adelaide was a Lady.

Lurking until the end of July - Please PM/tag me to get my attention