Word Count :: 378

It had grown easier to move the past two weeks, and so the hybrid had been looping the borders once more, moving with painful slowness compared to her former pace. With her returning movement came her strength, and now one could hardly see her injuries—they were nearly scars, still fresh and pink and shiny, but nearly fully healed. As for her limp, well—she doubted she'd ever get rid of that. There was a heaviness in her right forepaw that would never leave her. At least she had escaped with her life, and at least the monster was dead—now would be the lull, now would be the years when a new monster sought to make his claim on the world, sinking his teeth into the innocent. By the time he was ready to reign, though, Kaena rather thought she would be dead and buried—this fall, she would see her eleventh birthday.

The sound of a soft call rather nearby drew the hybrid's attention; one gnawed ear and one whole one lifted up to catch the sound. It was a stranger's voice, the coyote knew—there was not so much as a note of familiarity in this howl. The coyote altered course, heading toward the sound with renewed energy and interest. Before long, she came upon a ghostly white figure, her eyes brilliant and striking green against the pale of her coat. Though it was clear the canine before her was wolfish, there was a clear hint of coyote in her as well. These subtle hints to the strangers' blood might have been missed by one with a less sharp eye than Kaena; the scarred hybrid was well-versed in the appearances of her own kind, the mixed bloods—she had seen enough of her grown children to generally be able to call a coyote when she saw one.

“Hello,” she said. “Looking for something?” the hybrid asked. Her voice was neither cold nor warm; rather, it was simply indifferent. She had seen this scenario a hundred thousand times, and she would see it perhaps a hundred more before she died—greeting newcomers at the border were simply one of the tasks she had grown accustomed to, and thus it was done with an almost robotic monotony.

Just wondering—in your original post, you mentioned her as being 75% wolf, 15% coyote—you did mean 25% coyote, right? ^^;; I just assumed because that'd only be 90% of a canine! XD I just wanted to make sure you didn't mean 85% wolf, 15% coyote, 'cause then Heidi couldn't join Inferni... :/

Though in truth this woman looked little like her Jael, the silver-shaded coyote could not help but draw the comparison; a wolfish and white-coated canine seeking to be amongst the coyotes. Kaena did not care much for percentages; what mattered to the scarred canine was the lifestyle chosen by the canine in question. Kaena herself was of muddled and mixed blood, but she had chosen the life of a coyote, and so she was a coyote. Had she lived amongst wolves, had she been able to stomach such a thing—well, she wouldn't be very much of a coyote then, would she?

There was subtle submission from this woman, and though the scarred Centurion did not demand such wolfish signs of respect, her own Canis lupus crowed at it, soaking up the pleasure and praise as if it were sunlight. “Well, there are a lot of wolf packs around here, but this is a coyote clan,” the coyote explained, her sharp golden eye looking toward the other canine. Her face was still motionless, carved from stone and chipped, gouged with age. “This is Inferni, I am Kaena Lykoi, the subleader of the clan,” she added, introducing herself and this place more formally. The pallid canine had already taken initiative and offered her skills and sufficiency; the hybrid woman noted this with a very faint smile. “What skills do you have?” she queried, the next logical step in the process.

Word Count :: 302 No problem at all! I'm absolutely horrible with numbers myself, so I can see how such a mistake would be made, for sure! Also, no problem. XD A day isn't even a long time. <3 I'm going to accept you now so you can post elsewhere, but if you want to continue this thread a few more posts, I can have Kae explain bits of Inferni to Heidi. ^_^ Up to you! If not, we can always just wrap this one up here. Welcome to 'Souls! <3

The silver-shaded coyote knew what a precarious position Inferni held. They had fought very hard for a long time for their recognition as a legitimate group—when the clan had first been founded, the wolves had flat-out refused to recognize their borders. Coyotes can't claim land like us, they said, strolling easily across Inferni's borders, onto Inferni's territory. Though now most of the other packs' alphas saw their leadership and territory legitimately, there were still individuals who believed the coyotes' claims to land, leadership, legitimacy were improper and false. Perhaps there always would be.

At the pallid woman's words, a toothy and soulless smile appeared on her scarred muzzle; in those words, she saw herself reflected a thousand times over. “Then you will fit in very well here,” the hybrid said, the ghost of that smile still lingering on her lips, though it had mostly disappaited by now. There was just one wolf good enough to run with them—the scarred woman had a very high opinion of Lucia Cabriel, and she understood what had transpired between the shadow-coated woman and Snake. “Well, I would say then there's no reason to let you slip away,” the hybrid responded. With herself mostly out of commission, the coyote clan could use as much extra muscle as they possibly could handle.

“Welcome to Inferni, then,” she said, beckoning the pale canine forward and onto the coyote clan's land for the first time. “For now, you'll have the rank of Tirones, which is subordinate. With your skills, though, you'll probably find it best to pursue the Bellum ranks—Equites, Hastati, Hydra, Triarii. They're all warrior ranks,” the coyote explained. She did not wish to innundate the woman with too much information at once, so here she paused, waiting for questions or comments from Inferni's newest member.

Word Count :: 480 Alright! Just so you know, you can have as many threads as you want. ^^ You can count your posts from this thread for the Inferni Game if you wanted to play. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask. ^_^

The silvery coyote had no qualms accepting hybrids to their midsts. She herself was of mixed lines, too muddled and mixed up to ever clearly define just what was in her blood. Her mother was an easy and straightforward hybrid—mix coyote and dog, Delphine was the apparent result. On the other hand, her father was an unknown; though he had looked to be a gray wolf, with his coat a deep gray, almost black, he had always told Kaena he was a red wolf, and he did in fact have coyote blood within himself, too. His family had hybridized with coyotes and even gray wolves on occasion, from the days when red wolves were quite nearly extinct.

None of this was truly pertinent, however, as regardless of what she had running through her veins, she had chosen to live as a coyote. She had called herself such for many years now, and the silver-shaded woman knew very well what she was—coyote. The world had not let her forget it when she was young, and now she bore this Canis latrans badge with more snarling, vicious pride than even the world at large could have squeezed or beaten from her. There was no questioning it; she had chosen coyote over wolf, over dog. For that, she trusted those hybrid who claimed a part of their bloodline as dominant. It simply made sense to her—she was no more a wolf than Tayui or Naniko were a coyotes. “Well, you can stay wherever you'd like—the caves at the center of the territory and the mansion in the forest are where most sleep,” the coyote said. The Centurion herself preferred the caves, but she didn't have any stake in where Heidi decided to make her home—it was entirely up to the clan's newest Tirones to decide this.

“As for hunting—the Forest of Nod to the the south border and the Riparian Moors at the center of the territory are prime spots. There's also the north mountain, all along Halcyon—there are some prey animals there, I'd guess,” the hybrid said. She paused just a moment before continuing. “You'll find a lot of little things, raccoons and beavers, a lot of weasel-looking things. They're fast, but they're not bad. Sometimes we get deer, too, but not a lot bigger than that—moose might wander here now and again, but that's rare,” the coyote said. She felt this was the most she had spoken at once in months. Either way, such information needed to be passed along, and the coyote was glad that Heidi was seeking to settle herself in so well. “I'm heading to the caves. If you need me, that's where you'll find me,” the coyote said. Such a greeting was punctuated with a half-smile, and with that, the scarred Centurion started off, her pace easy and languid.