07-19-2009, 05:07 AM
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[/html]1181, and honestly this is probably the longest post I've ever written. XD;
Sofia had walked west for a long time. Four weeks and three days, to be exact. She hadn't taken the most direct path, nor traveled at the quickest speed. She took her time, studying the lands as she had gone by. Everything looked.. different. It was amazing how crisp and intense things as simple as colors were, when viewed with an appreciative instead of casual eye. Sunsets and beautiful sky lines. All of it. It was the last time she would see any of the places. She wasn't going back. She was heading to the birthplace of her father to die. There was an odd symmetry to it; there was a poetic ring to the whole idea, and that something that had always appealed to her.
Beyond that, she wasn't sure what she was looking for. Father had given her directions, and she had followed them. She recognized the river first; Yawrah, winding its way through burnt lands that were ever so slowly beginning the process of new life. All the scents were old, but she had found Jaded Shadows, eying the remnants of the home that had briefly been hers. He had made one request as she left; he wanted Sofia to leave a flower in his own personal graveyard, in the lands that had once held Storm.
And so she had. Four simple gravestones loomed, and she had spent an entire day there, just looking, and thinking. Three were unknown to her: a grandmother, Tempest Tide, and two never-met aunts, Maeve and Aeila, dead before they were even half as old as their niece. The fourth was her mother. Lily. A dim, warm figure of love and happiness and youth, a presence and a feeling more than a face. God, she had been so young. A month? Two? She didn't remember, not really.
It would be nice to make a friend, if only to have someone to take her dead body back there, to rest beside her ancestors (of heart if not of blood). She had climbed inside her father's nearby den, breathing in the scent of Calypso, missing him terribly. It had broken her heart, daddy's girl as she was, to abandon him like that. But it would have heart him worse, if he had known the truth. That his baby girl, that the only thing in his life that still mattered, was dying. He would have found some way to blame himself, he always blamed himself. So she left him half a week after she had found out, after she had discovered her prognosis.
The wolf who had examined her had been an family friend - Sofia trusted his word to be accurate. Of course, the old doctor had human medical books, and had walked Sofi through the process he had undertaken, showing her why he had drawn the conclusion she had. The four pages, ripped out of the medical book with his consent (he couldn't very well deny a dying girl such a simple request!) were tucked into the pocket of her green dress-shirt. That shirt, the papers, a bag dangling from her shoulders, and some comfortable black slacks were all she had brought with her.
So far, the paper's predictions were right, although it didn't take a psychic to guess that what had started as a simple, occasional pain in the bones of her front legs would intensify, progressing to the dull ache as the cancer gnawed away at the inside of her bones. It was still bearable, for now. Another reason she had to leave, fast - while she could still travel at a pace that was brisk enough to eat away the ground. Sofia had done most of her traveling in natural wolf form, but the thumb and fingers of shifted form was safer when picking her way through the sometimes precarious path she had taken through the mountain.
The lands had been clearly abandoned, there was really no point in staying there. So she traveled west, following the direction the majority of the scents had headed. Why not? She wasn't going back, couldn't go back, only direction to go from here was forward.
The rain had been pretty frequent lately, and her bare feet and the bottom of her slacks were speckled with caked, dried mud. It wasn't too wet right now, but the clouds promised to remedy that situation quite shortly. Heading away from the frightening shore, a forest loomed and she padded towards it, realizing only after entering that the scrawny, scattered trees did not actually thicken in density as she progressed deeper. She'd have to find someplace else to hide out from the storm, and the appearance of the one above was that it'd be strong enough to definitely warrant finding a roof.
A surprisingly fresh scent (given the frequency of scent-fading rain) seemed to be of the same idea. With the slightest hesitancy, desire to find someplace with a solid roof overtook the awkward avoidance of others that she'd been clinging to on her travels thus far. The scent led to a road, and from there to a village. There was a sign, but her green eyes slipped over it. She didn't care enough to spend the time it took her to puzzle out what it said - she wasn't a very good reader. She could do it, with enough time to burn and sometimes a person there to correct her mistakes, but she really hated it. As much as she loved stories, actual books were frustrating to her, and a mild dyslexia took her outside the realm of Calypso's teaching abilities.
The scent ended at a door, and Sofia hesitated again. She didn't really have to go in, here. There were plenty of other buildings around this old, empty town. Plenty of choices for shelter, now that she had been led here. Her green eyes slid along the thick, fogged-at-the-edges glass pane. There was definitely someone in there, although it was hard to make out details through the old, old glass. Whoever she was, she might have seen Sofi by now. It would be awkward to walk away, after having paused at the doorstep for so long. So she slipped inside, giving up hope of escaping the impending social interaction. Which, now that the coming storm was safely averted, was highest on her list of immediate worries.
The stranger was seated at the table, a small flame burning a candle before her. The intruder paused, evaluating the situation, considering the scent. The other female was smaller than her in build. Definitely older than Sofi's scant year and a half, although she couldn't really tell by how much. Her coloring, too.. It all caused her mind to flit back to old studies, to faded pictures in old books as Calypso had explained to her the truth of her parentage. "Are you a coyote?" She said softly, emerald eyes wide in the dimming light as dark clouds outside billowed over the few fractions of a sun that still valiantly worked to shine. The young girl's carefully cultivated manners were momentarily forgotten in the new excitement of the moment.