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The girl herself had begun to change, the shadows flickering across her face shifting and melting with the movement of the fire. Eris watched this with fascination; though she was the elder of the pair and should have been the wise mentor, she could not help this fascination from creeping across her face in a dazed and distant smile that lingered long after it was appropriate to do so. It matched the bear's grin, though the one Eris bore was far more life-like, still fiery and alive.
Salvia's eyes were gone, the nuclear green reduced to a ring of flame around wide pits of shadow. Awareness dawned slowly across the younger woman's face, an awareness Eris could no more rescind than she could her own motherhood. Salvia had taken the gift, and there was no returning it now. Her perspective would be forever altered -- one could not look at the world through those spirit's eyes and retain an outlook of normalcy. Eris had experienced it herself in that lifeless desert so far to the south.
Her fingers had painted stripes across her daughter's flesh all on their own, with little interference from the coal-hued woman herself. Now, her fingers and Salvia's stripes were crusted dry, indicating some passage of time since she had begun painting. This was not curious to the woman, who knew mortal time was meaningless in the other world. Her breath came sharply all the same when she looked to Salvia.
Now, the girl's eyes were whole again with fire, but lacking any darkness whatsoever -- brilliant green, brighter and truer than Salvia and Eris's eyes, had taken over the entirety of the younger woman's gaze. Eris jerked at the sight of those eyes, intimately familiar and strange all at once. She had seen them a hundred thousand times before, and she would see them innumerable times to come, but they were no less startling, no less disconcerting. She knew who they belonged to, and she could call him by name now.
Her voice was nothing more than a cracked and indeterminate whisper, however, drowned by the tawny woman's shriek. To Eris's ears, however, the shriek was a bellow, the voice of a man. The figure was no longer her daughter, but her namesake, the one who had bequeathed the timberwolf's appearance to Salvia. The coal hybrid looked at him, elation and sorrow overwhelming all half-logical, drug-addled thought from her mind. She reached out to touch him, fingers shaking and trembling with more than just the mushroom's effects.
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