WC: 505.
He responded with a nod and a demand. She obliged, but not necessarily as willingly as she would have liked. She didn’t want to go into The Ruins now – she’d rather sit outside and enjoy the breeze as the world cooled down. But since she was the one seeking his help and he was the one who was apparently a higher-ranked wolf, she would have to follow him whether she liked it or not. She paused and let him get a head start before she slowly followed him into the crumbling building. She moved quickly and quietly, not trusting this wolf enough to follow him with complete abandon. She didn’t know who he was or what his motivations were; all she had was a name, a face, a scent, a rank, and a co-rank. She didn’t know what made him who he was and this put her on edge. She didn’t like owing favours, especially to unknown characters.
As they ventured deeper in to The Ruins, she felt the temperature fall and the smell of rotting greenery fell away. Janos took a seat on a rock and Tayui followed in a half-circle to take her place on a nearby rock. She stepped onto a jutting floorboard supported by a small tree and then nimbly leapt on to a smooth boulder. She saw him dip his head, but was too busy finding a good place to sit comfortably while looking relaxed and feeling overly alert.
She flicked her ears forward when he began to speak and then frowned. A lecture, really? She was twice his age and she could speak up or down if she so liked. She tried to relax her features, but all she could think of were trite responses, and she hoped it did not reflect on her expression. She had looked up when she’d spoken the second time, but maybe he was just hard of hearing; she didn’t know. With all those scars and half an ear, she reasoned that it was likely he’d lost some of his senses here and there.
She glanced from his broken ear back to his maw as he spoke again. This time, he had something she could respond to, and since it was the reason she’d sought him out, she was glad they weren’t dawdling.
I can read and write in English, she replied slowly, and I can speak a bit of low-speech. I was working on a way of writing down the low-speech years ago, but I’ve since abandoned the project. If you can speak the lesser languages, we might be able to communicate with an animal. That would be useful, too, if we could find a bird to carry messages, she explained. She kept it simple and tried not to embellish too much. She didn’t bother mentioning the ghost crow who’d once kept her company; while she thought he would be an excellent messenger, he wasn’t very reliable, and it would be a difficult idea to explain if he refused to believe in ghosts.