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Apologies if I misunderstood the meaning behind the ceremony.
Word Count: 500. Worth 5 points.
Hanna had arrived a little bit after the ceremony began but still appeared in time to feed a leaf-bundled rabbit into the flames. Tobias had helped her, seeming upset when he learned there would be no tidbits from the little mammal, but she'd insisted and tried to explain what she'd been told to her avian companion, feeling as though perhaps she'd missed the point as well. The point after all was to abstain from eating the thing you normally did, and Hanna rarely pursued rabbits, leaving them to Tobias in favor of larger, though sick or injured, prey.
As Hanna backed away from the huge and flickering ceremonial fire, she found her mind wandering to her time in Chimera as a younger wolf and how hypnotizing the fire at the Alpha's Rock, the meeting place of the pack, was to her. This would be the beginning of Hanna's reverting to her reverence for flame, helper and destroyer all in the same entity. Her eyes watched the core of the bonfire for many moments and then raised to take in all the members of the tribe, both familiar and unknown to her. Dawali's voice rang out, capturing her attention, explaining for all to hear the meaning of the ceremony -- appeasing the spirits -- and the second stage, the quenching of the flames and the restarting of the fire.
With that, Dawali grabbed something from the ground which turned out to be sand, and tossed it into the fire. Hanna was not unfamiliar with this method, as extinguishing a fire in this manner created far less smoke than pouring water over it. And so the dark femme bent to add her own sand to the mix. Bit by bit, the brilliant light given off by the blaze darkened and fled, till the whole gathering was left in almost complete blackness, the fragrant smell of tobacco clinging to their fur, the torches from the flames seeming miles away and ever so tiny.
After a seemingly interminable, completely silent pause, as if even the crickets understood the solemnity of the moment, Hanna saw movement and studied Dawali as he bent down and, instead of withdrawing a flint and steel, the more modern tools, the Kalona took from an ornate stone box embers that had been kept alive, possibly for time out of mind. Before long, the darkness receded again as the flames grew in height, and the Kalona finished his speech, concluding with the invitation to eat.
Despite being hungry, the music Dawali played made her feet itch to dance as she hadn't since her sun dance with Noir in the fields. Letting a space clear, Hanna began to leap and twirl, following no rhythm or pattern but letting her heart pick her path around. Maybe Noir would even join her. They could demonstrate just how it was to dance and swing. They had had pretty good rhythm together, and they didn't look half bad together either, blonde and black moving in harmony.
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