son, you got strychnine in your blood
#1
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Date: 25 February

Time: Late afternoon

Words: 422
Miramichi Valley

One other, por favor. I guess two is okay? ._. /shrug



Ithiel is by me!

Ithiel frequently scouted outside of Inferni to various areas of the lands, seeking whatever there was to be sought. His horse, the strawberry roan named Bairre, was not lathered in the least, as he'd kept a steady and rather slow pace the whole way out here. Zedekiah soared somewhere ahead of him, and Ithiel craned his neck skyward, finding no sign of the bird to his dismay. The dust-colored man ridden for several hours, looping around the sprawling town and avoiding the new pack that had sprung up to the north of the mountains.

Little outside his new homeland concerned him. The wolf packs were fine as long as they kept to their own, as far as Ithiel was concerned. So far as Ithiel knew, Inferni was the only coyote clan of these lands. He knew nothing of Inferni's heavily coyote closest neighbor, of course, and merely assumed the remainder of the packs consisted entirely of wolves, and perhaps the odd coyote hybrid, as Terra had been. They were therefore of no concern to him until (unless, he supposed, but in Ithiel's mind, it was a certainty rather than possibility) they made trouble for Inferni.

There was a mountain to the north of him, and a lake to the north and east. He had passed between them, seeing the mountain and smelling the scent of the lake, but paid no mind to either landform, instead continuing on to the valley. He thought he might travel the rest of the day and stop for a night. The next day, hooking back toward the shore and following it home seemed his best and fastest way. He had been through these lands but once before, on his way to Inferni. Familiarity with all the nearby lands was to be desired, and a scout's knowledge need not end with his clan's borders.

There were many small streams and brooks coursing through this shallow valley, most of them sluggish enough to freeze with winter. Only a thin crust of snow remained, however, as the winter had been blessedly mild thus far. Nevertheless, Ithiel had seen more snow on this side of the bay -- perhaps it was colder here? The dusky coyote hunkered down, ears flattening with thoughts of cold. He was built and bred for the desert, and as cold as desert nights got, they rarely saw snow. Still, Ithiel was not one to complain -- he bore this as he did any other hardship in life: silently and utterly without complaint.

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#2
Siiiiiieeeeee! Hope you don't mind me! x:

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“Do you know why blood is red, girl?” she remembered Grandmother asking her, almost as if she stood by her side now, murmuring it in her ear. She hadn’t replied, but the woman had struck a match and showed her the flickering flame, continuing: “Because it is fire, child. Fire made water. That’s why, even when it’s cold, the body is warm. It burns from the inside out” She always thought that when she saw blood, when it would pool and dry black like coals and cinders. While skinning a rabbit for cooking this morning she had cut herself, watched the blood seep from the wound and knew it looked like flames licking around the border of a kept-fire. She had bound the wound and cooked her breakfast, feeling as though she had maintained the fires with a bandage and stoked them with warm food.


She had just now started to realize how the population of this area was concentrated. She would be frightened if she could fear at all. Strangers had never bothered her because she had been the strangest of all of them. They had allowed her to pass as long as she had stayed away. Some had visited her, curried her favor with gifts and in return asked for her boons and her curses on their enemies. She always left before she learned the aftermath, but she didn’t deny the effects. The cursed danced in pain in her dreams while the polite won the favor of their intended, hunted well and grew strong. She would watch, sometimes with her brothers looking over her shoulder, before moving on. She had been moving on since she had buried Grandmother in the grave they had both dug days previous to her death, and she thought she would never cease moving. No matter. It suited her fine.


Grandmother had taught her that most wolves had it wrong: hunting was something to be made sacred, and the real way to hunt was trapping. She had taught the girl the way to make snares, to find where the prey would walk themselves into her hands. It was automatic that whenever the sun would begin to fall, she would set up a camp and begin to rig the perimeter with traps. This was what she did this afternoon, having left her pack behind with rope and wire in hand. She made the loop, coiled the snare, whispered under her breath to every ghost, spirit, god that would listen that it might hold food in the morning. She stood from the trap and heard steps, heavy things that caused her heart to jump in rate. This confused her. She approached the sound, tasting an alien sweet smell on the roof of her mouth. It came to be that from a distance she could spy another, on the back of a strange animal. Foxglove had never seen a horse before, though the legs and form reminded her of deer, elk. The smell was sweet and it smelled of the earth and she liked it. She approached some, each step beginning to quaver slightly as her nerves frayed. Alone, she was poetry. Around others, she was cardiac arrhythmia.


She had no idea how to hail the other. Words often confused her; they cracked on her tongue and the meaning slipped out, filled other words and got mixed up. Her jaw clenched and then she lifted a hand that quaked once or twice to her mouth. She whistled, so piercing it stirred birds from the trees. She kept her hand lifted, gestured to him vaguely. She was interested and she could not keep herself from it. It was not just the beast, but the brown-toned man who hunched on his back like a hitchhiking bird. There was an aquiline quality to his features that resonated with her, and yet did not with others she had met. It could be said that Foxglove was not smart enough to fear, and that might be true in their minds, but in hers this was simple occurrence in her life: inspecting that which she did not know.

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#3
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(396)



Ithiel is by me!

The world was winter-bared, but Ithiel thought this valley might be particularly lush and beautiful come spring and summer. Inferni's territory was not so well-forested as this valley seemed. The marshes and rolling plains of the Waste were primarily without woods -- here and there, stunted individual trees and scraggly copses of them hunkered against the plains wind. The coyotes carved their harsh existence out in a hard place, to be sure.

Ithiel would not have traded Inferni's lands for these or any other, however. The Waste reminded him of the desert in Scintilla. It was not so harsh as those sandy plains, but neither was it a land of excessive comforts. Inferni therefore produced stronger children, youths raised in the coyote clan becoming the next year's hardened warriors. He had no young warriors of his own -- there were no children of his within the clan's ranks. The dust-colored man yearned for the day he sent his own son to training and saw him to the adult ranks. A son required a woman, however, and Ithiel did not have any plans for a lady as of yet.

Bairre snorted suddenly, and Ithiel stiffened in his saddle. The dust-colored coyote saw nothing, but before long, the sound greeted his ears, a bird-like screetch that caused him to sit bold upright in his seat, growing tall and straight as one of his arrows. The birds fluttering upward were reacting, not the source of the noise, and so Ithiel ignored them. The ashen hybrid stared hard, his carnelian-hued eyes seeking the noise's source point. His chocolate-colored ears swiveled on his head, first one direction and then the other.

Finally, he saw her, a rust-hued woman with highlights of mahogany and even tawny-gold streaked through her fur. At such distance, Ithiel could not determine her heritage -- coyote or wolf? He pondered this as he held the stallion Bairre in his place, murmuring wordless soothing to the quine. The dusky coyote dismounted, grasping the reins and leading the horse forward. A strange way to call your greeting, he said, the comment delivered with impeccable dryness. As always, Ithiel was adamantine of face, his countenance revealing nothing. It was smooth and hard as a stone churned for decades in the ocean, all its telling features worn away to nothing.

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