Ornature

The tenants at Cold Crescent are used to the strange, intense young people who come and go from the tech company that occupies the upper floors. Start-up, you know, or defense contractor or whatever - that's what strangers might think, when they think about the tops floors. If they think about them.

You get used to anything. You get used to everything.

During office hours the Garou try to stay away from the public spaces. Avoid rush hour in the elevator bays, keep to the industrial stairwells threaded through the structure that business people avoid when traveling between floors.

Upstairs, 5:30ish, sun still bright in the sky, one of the express elevators opens up and spills two of those too-bright youths onto one of the limited-access floors.

They are: bruised and a bit blooded, and also: fine. They're wolves. Their bodies can heal from anything short of death, and even then they can return. Gaia's fucking immune system.

"I'm starving," Charlotte to Erich, of the tinypack, as they emerge from the elevator. "I wanna order sushi pizza. We can get you a meatzza."

She doesn't know what that is.

She might have just made that up.

They haven't Talked About Things in a while, which is probably good. Sometimes that doesn't go so well.

"What's a sushi pizza?"

Erich is scraped and bruised and victorious. Erich is carrying some sort of groddy trophy over his shoulder in a watertight sack, aka a bodybag, only this one is all festive and blue or red or something so people don't necessarily think bodybag when they see it. He dumps it on the floor: SQUISH-clatter-bonk-bonk. Dusts his hands off, blows out a breath.

"They don't make meatzzas. I tried once to order a pizza without the dough but they were like, it'll just melt and fall through the grill if we try to put it in the oven. But we can buy pepperoni and sausage and ham and bacon and mush it all together with a bit of mozzarella and a bit of pizza sauce and a lot of italian seasoning and it basically tastes the same."

"-- and I guess I'm just kinda let down," Goldie was in the middle of explaining when the elevator doors next to the ones that spilled out a Shadow Lord and Silver Fang (well isn't that a funny duo) opened up as well. "I mean, how stereotypical that the rural place is full of fun-suckers. Do you think it's because they leave sticks laying around the challenge circle? So, like, when someone falls down it goes right up their assholes?"

The 'right' was complete with a rather violent gesture, where Goldie used her hands to creatively represent a visual of what a stick going up a rectum must look like. She'd stepped out of the elevator mid animated chatter, hands leading the way through the air ahead.

She and Matthew were together on this visit, and they brought evidence of the thunder and rain from the world outside with them. Goldie was wearing a yellow raincoat that still held drops on its water resistant fabric, unzipped and hood pushed down. Under that was a white-and-black striped T-shirt, which went well with a pair of very tight black jeans and her favorite black boots. An equally black scarf knit in a loop was wrapped about her neck, and moisture clung to it in places as well.

And speaking of moisture, a 'squelch-squish' sound pulled her attention to the duo up ahead.

It was a dramatic gesture when she pointed at the waterproof red-and-blue bag of festivity and nasty. "What is that?"

"What if you took like chicken skin and cooked it 'til it was crispy like dough and then put the toppings on it?" Charlotte asks. She is: somewhat tallish (5'7ish?) willowy thing who has the sort of physicality of a supermodel, at least from a distance. This spare and lean and nearly child-like frame. Call her: waifish. "I bet that would be pretty good. And I don't know what sushi pizza is. I just want to try it."

She is a fan of mixing: cereals, sodas, and virtually anything else that strikes her shifting fancy until it resembles nothing-like-food. She is also: pure bred as fuck.

Shining. Lovely. Mad.

Do not call her: squeamish. They are somewhere and Erich is dumping the brightly colored tye-dyed bodybag on the linoleum floor of an open space in the center of one of the floors that serves as you know, meeting room and monster-gutting facility and the creature is stilling down on her haunches, reaching up for the zipper.

"It was a person. Then his heart got eaten up by worms and he grew a second face on his back and an arm like a 'gator's head and a stupid donkey tail."

Like evolution, the Wyrm is not always practical in its investments.

Flick flick. Pale pale eyes, curious and (shockingly! Erich!) rather oddly forthright as she unzips the prize. "Who are you?"

"I don't know." Erich looks dubious. "I mean that could be amazing, but it could also be really fucking gross. Let's try it sometime. Is sushi pizza really a thing, or did you just make that up too?"

They are interrupted. Or rather, they are discovered. Ding! goes the other elevator bell, and Erich turns, face all animated and mid-conversation, expression all expectant. Out comes... two people he hasn't met before. One of them wants to know what's in the bag.

"Honor and glory for me, blondie," he says, right as Charlotte is being a tad bit more specific about the contents. Not that he isn't blond, himself, because he is. Not quite as white-blond as Charlotte though, or even so golden-blond as he was when he was like, eighteen, sixteen, six years old. Darker with the oncoming winter, now.

Also, echoing his tinypack-sister: "Who're you guys?"

"Do I think that?"

Look at his face. He's so perturbed by Goldie's vulgarity that he doesn't even want to dignify it with a response. He does it anyway though. Just in case anyone heard the silence after the question and thought the silence implied agreement. He does not agree with her. Not even a little.

He's saved from further exploration of the topic by the No Moon's dramatics. As he steps out of the elevator it's obvious he recognizes neither Charlotte who he has never met before nor Erich who he met in darkness under less than ideal circumstances. If he were to ever breed his children would be Kinfolk if they would not be fated to Change. His bearing and his blood tells of the strength of his lineage. He's wearing work boots and jeans and a rain-slicked jacket but there's no mistaking him for anything other than Fianna.

Hearing the question echoed has Matt slowly looking sidelong at Goldie like to ask her if she's going to answer them or not.

"It's real." Charlotte assures Erich, of the sushi-pizza. She does this: solemnly. She has a face that is suited for such solemnities, you must know. These huge pale blue eyes and this aristocratic skin and a certain frame and bearing even with her strange and still somehow adolescent gawkiness that is,

you know,

kingly. "They have it in Montreal. It's really, really good. You'd like it if you could get rice. Or I figure you could just buy a pizza and put sushi on it. Maybe you could just make a crust out of hamburger though. Then top it. We should try to make a meattzza when we go back home."

"Us?"

Well, Goldie did have a pentiant for the dramatic. Perhaps the due date that her mother was given landed under a Gibbous moon-- she was born a little early, after all. Either way, Goldie proudly jammed a thumb to her chest and jutted her chin out when she proclaimed:

"We're Fianna."

As though that should say it all. She glanced briefly to Matthew, then jammed that same thumb through the air in his direction. There had been a pause there where she'd considered putting one hand on his back and smacking the other hand into the bartender Kinsman's chest instead, but some modicum of either respect or restraint had her deciding to gesture his way instead. Either way, the beacon of Old Hearthfires and Headresses of Antlers was pointed to as an indicator. "Couldn't you tell?"

From there, she jammed her hands into her coat pockets and wandered further toward the tye-dye bag of Glory and Honor. With a bit of a sniff, she turned her head to Erich and asked in perfectly innocent curiosity: "What was so honorable about the Chimera kill?"

It's that solemnity that wins Erich over, time and again. It's that solemnity, and that pale-eyed, wide-eyed wisdom of hers that makes Erich suddenly grin and reach over and hug her against his beefy side. The indignity of a brief noogie is administered, and then Erich just relaxes into that random loose-armed side-hug.

"I don't like raw fish. Maybe we can put some grilled fish on top of hamburger. Like sushi surf 'n turf, I bet that'd be good."

The new people announce themselves. Fianna: he snorts, letting go of Charlotte and turning to face them.

"Damn right I could tell. I could tell from the beer fumes wafting over this way. I meant like, names. I'm Erich. This's Charlotte. And the Chimera kill," is that what it's called? Erich isn't sure. Maybe Charlotte knows, but Erich: Erich's just going to play along and pretend he knows what that is for now, "is honorable 'cause we were out killing it while you two were pickling yourselves. OH, BURNNN." And he holds up a hand for Charlotte to high-five.

Matt just shakes his head and turns around to find the stairs.

Charlotte has unzippered the Chimera-kill and within the bag is a twisted man with a scraggly gray beard whose face has gone strange and slack and sick, tongue too-white, thick and lolling. The suggestion of the twisted arm a slick and sickly green and she is looking down at him with what is both a mildly detached interest and a kind of mournful intensity. The prize was long-since cleansed, still.

There is a humid stink to it and Matt turns around and Charlotte assumes that that is: why.

"Sorry." THIS IS KIND OF MUMBLED and she reached to zip-it-back-up, real quick and then she's standing and Erich pulls her in for a side-hug and don't they look like brother and sister.

Sometimes she high-fives him absent-mindedly or intently or not the proper way at all. Tonight she glances at Erich's hand, then Matt's back. "That wasn't very nice Erich, I think you hurt his feelings."

Annnd he's left hanging! Deflated, Erich lets his hand flop back to his side. "Well, his friend started it," he protests -- just like the mature, grown-up, Fosternized Big Boy that he is. "She was all being psh! about our kill. Anyway, it's just friendly rivalry. Keeps things interesting. Don't worry, Blondie, I'm not gonna keep ragging on you now that your backup's upped and left you. Wouldn't be sportsmanlike."

The comradery between the tall skinny moon-eyed Silver Fang and the beefy-flanked Shadow Lord was evident. Packmates, Goldie had to guess, but that was something just to be scrawled on a post-it note and tacked on the corkboard of This New Community for analysis later. More than that she was curious to see this gator-armed donkey-tailed person.

The grizzled-gray beard and lolling tongue upper body rolled out of the bag, and Goldie straightened up and stepped back, even went so far as to wrinkle her nose and make a kind of 'Hoo-ee' sound at the sight.

But there was Erich, then, insisting that he could smell the beer on them and didn't need their tribe because of it. Called his kill honorable because he was killing it instead of killing shots like they were supposedly doing. There is, momentarily, a snap in the air. It isn't like when the earth cracks and magma heat boils up from underneath, not like when an Ahroun feels a push of Rage, but it is still there and sharp and hot and electric. The second time such a response was provoked from the little Fianna by the Fenrir-turned-Lord.

"Woooowwww," she drawled out. Matt had turned to leave, and Goldie reached out to nab onto his coat sleeve-- near the cuff, like maybe she wanted his hand but missed. "Matthew Murphy, are you just going to walk and let this guy talk about us like that?"

The answer was probably going to be a yes, and maybe that would be communicated in a glance, or maybe not, but she looked back to Erich and scoffed a dramatic little scoff and put her free hand on her hip.

"Did you hear a 'pish'? I didn't hear a 'pish'. I heard a lot of fish, but no 'pish'. I mean, I was asking what made it Honorable and not just Glorious, but some lines got crossed and suddenly we were reduced to this." The hand that was on her hip gestured before them, as though she was indicating some sort of scene that had unfurled and made a mess of the place.

Charlotte goes all-alert at that snap of electricity, the spark of rage that does-not-precisely ignite beneath Goldie's skin but still: brights, turns over, draws her taut through the spine.

There is, a new wariness about her in that moment that feels more animal than human. The tension in her spine and shoulders. The way she stands so as to keep both Goldie and Erich in view.

Quieter now. A slow-flush of color pinking her aristrocratic cheeks.

She's right at Erich's side, still.

A bit of blood on her hands, but never-you-mind.

He doesn't jerk his cuff out of her grip. That would be rude. When he does turn back around he's trying not to roll his eyes and he's got his tongue pushed into the back of an incisor like that's keeping him from saying something he's going to regret later.

Goldie doesn't need him to defend her. She can do a fine enough job on her own. So she steers him back to her side and Matt stands there looking back and forth between the two of them. Wary not the same way that Charlotte is wary but wary in the way that meatbags are wary.

There's a tension suddenly that Erich doesn't quite understand. He gives Charlotte a quizzical look. He gives Matthew a quizzical look. He looks down at the carcass, which stinks, and then he drops to a crouch to zip the bag back up.

"Okay, so... not sure why everyone's all edgy suddenly, but I'm gonna go dump the body somewhere where the Guardians have check it over and then get rid of it." And thus speaking, he heaves the load back onto his capable shoulders.

A tilt of his head Matthew-ward before he goes -- "Does he ever talk? And what's your name? I mean, you called him Matthew, but I'm gonna start assuming your name actually is Blondie unless I hear otherwise."

The bright-electric burn of Rage didn't manifest in a sharpening of teeth or flex of muscles. Goldie's body language didn't even look that violent, really, but there was an undeniable prickly quality to her voice now. She was a bright little falling star of a human, petite and lean with a mass of sandy-blond hair that was piled up into a knot on top of her hair, bound tight and kind of frizzy in the weather. She shouldn't be facing off against an Ahroun, but who called this a face off? The way that Matt stood reluctantly stationed at her side and how Charlotte took up a quiet space at Erich's made it seem that way.

And Erich? Well, he just seemed confused.

Goldie blinked at him a few times, and answered his questions in a casual off-hand sort of way that didn't quite match the situation that they were standing in. "Oh, Blondie isn't too far off, really. It's Goldie."

She blinked and looked at Charlotte for a second. Goldie opened her mouth like she was going to say something-- she had somewhat bucked front teeth, that was noticeable in that moment. They worked with her face, didn't detract from the wide-eyed fae-like sort of pretty that she carried about her. Goldie looked like she belonged in the woods with flowers in her hair. Instead she wore mass-produced clothes and had pink lipstick on her lips.

Whatever it was she was going to ask Charlotte, she instead decided to direct at Erich. Sounding like she was breaking script to clarify something, she tipped her head forward and blinked at him instead.

"Do you really not understand how greeting us with alcoholism jokes was a shitty thing to do?"

Okay.

Okay.

See, just like that Charlotte's wariness melts - not away, but sinks somehow back beneath her skin, wraps itself around the base of her spine, goes back to whereever it lives when she has forgotten to be self-conscious.

Which is: rarely.

The unguarded immediacy of that initial encounter is long-since gone and in its wake she is: you know. Strange and awkward, the fringe of her hair dyed pink, her blood shining and singing and whispering promises in a way that she never, ever does.

"We asked who you were," a little one-armed shrug, Charlotte's voice is quite nearly a whisper. "And you didn't say. It might not've been a nice joke but what you did wasn't nice, either.

"Do you want to start again?" Charlotte gives Erich a Look. It is: mildly sidelong. She seems again really rather solemn. "We could do formal introductions."

Once that initial not-wanting to turn back around has passed Matt brings himself to look at the two Garou standing down the hallway and neither of them can see fear or timidity in him. A lack of patience maybe but that's different than fear.

Kinfolk are supposed to be patient. They are supposed to stand in the face of Rage and not quail. He has his hands in the pockets of his overcoat and he's watching Erich as he speaks. Still watching Erich as Goldie asks a question that sounds odd for its sincerity. He glances over at her like he isn't sure he's hearing her right.

And then the waif-girl offers up something like a truce. Maybe this is when it starts to become apparent that he's silent because he doesn't want to answer for the Garou girl at his side.

Instantly bewildered-indignant: "What! Since when was it not okay to reference the well-known drinking habits of the Fianna? Since when did the Fianna get all hypersensitive instead of giving as good as -- "

and this is when Charlotte comes in: quiet, level, and dare we say it: wise. Erich, also wisely showing some restraint for once, closes his mouth. He is given a look. He heaves a sigh, but then he tosses that burden higher up on the slope of his shoulder and faces the duo again.

"Okay. I guess we can start again. I'm Erich, called Storm's Teeth, also called Son of Rage, and it's actually a longer name than that 'cause a Silver Fang Philodox gave it to me. I'm a Shadow Lord." His eyes are momentarily ferocious: just daring them to say something about that. About the Shadow Lord thing, about the Silver Fang naming thing, all that. "I'm an Ahroun, and a Fostern."

Charlotte was a soft-spoken thing. Goldie may very well one day come to the conclusion that she spoke so quietly because her ears were busy hearing the spirits half the time anyways. Looking at her, the slight frame and how all of the color was wrung from her through so many years of selective breeding, she may also wonder if all of those voices actually were spirits and not made up.

Just like how one day Goldie may wonder what Erich was doing with the Shadow Lords, of all tribes. She might chalk that up to a misplaced 'fuck you' to mom and dad. She might actually ask one day, who knew?

Both of them Goldie looked at as though they were the daily sudoku puzzle in her paper. Like she was trying to figure them out but still needed to do some foot work before she could have all the boxes filled in. Erich was defensive, as though it was standard practice to give Fianna guff about pickling their livers, and Charlotte was trying to make peace. Matt? He was letting her do the talking-- the poor fucker.

"Hmmph," she said at first, and crossed her arms over her chest thoughtfully. "Right. Well. I've just got the one name-- Little Uproar. Fianna Ragabash Cliath. I was just trying to show my friend here how nice this place is. You see, we had kind of a negative experience going to try and shake hands out at Roxborough, but...." She unfolded her arms in a 'what do you do?' kind of a gesture, then sighed and looked back up to Matt.

"Sushi did sound pretty good. There's an all-you-can-eat place that I saw like six blocks over?"

The Ahroun's eyes go vicious for a moment and Matt doesn't mean to pull a face but he does. Like oh sure that's fair.

He goes on to frown when Goldie says they had a negative experience out at Roxborough. Lips purse like he's going to ask her what she's talking about but he schools his expression a second later because she's talking about sushi.

"You don't wanna wait for the rest of the formal introductions?" he asks. Tilts his eyes towards Charlotte. He can recognize Garou but not their heritage. He has no idea what he's getting himself into. "She only gave us her first name."

Would you look at that. He does have a voice.

"I'm Matt," he says like to ante up. His voice is deep even if it sounds disused like he spends most of his days listening instead of talking. "Murphy. My old man was Nolan Murphy, he was an Athro Theurge died in North Carolina about twelve years back. Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you too, Matt.

"I'm Eulalia Charlotte Horatia Evadne Jefferson-Gray, daughter of Guillaume Cédric Félix Ementier Gray, called the Spine of the Moon, called Starfall, called Silvertongue, called the Undying, son of [.... there's more here. there's so much more, but eventually she gets back around to:] called Black Sheep. Cliath Theurge. We're packmates. Our other packmate's up in Evergreen right now. At our house.

"This isn't," a blink in Goldie's direction, then back toward Matt as she's considering what to say next. "This isn't really a nice place. The Sept's here to guard the pit in the basement. It's not like Forgotten Questions. There the earth - "

Charlotte trails off, reverent and a bit strange and embarrassed and lots of things.

"You shouldn't eat all you can eat sushi. They just get cheap fish and dye it pink. Try Sushi Sushi. It's not all you can eat but they don't make you spend too much for a roll and they're really good. We gotta go take care of this dead guy. Bye."

And, turning back to Erich, the ghostly flash of her ghostly smile. "I want all of his fingerbones. Just the first joints. And the teeth are really good for lots of things. Especially from the alligator-arm. I wonder how long the roots are - "

Trailing off as they, you know, wander away with their corpse.

"Well," softening -- a little -- Erich shrugs Le Corpse a little higher again and looks about. "This place is pretty nice," that, right as Charlotte is calling it not-nice. Erich grumps at Charlotte for a moment, then presses on doggedly: "You been up to the roof yet, Uproar? Great view. Go before it gets cold.

"Anyway. Yeah. We gotta go dump a bod." He swings away. Gets a couple steps; turns back.

"Heh. Is your name seriously Goldie? Man, what are the chances. Blondie, Goldie, Goldilocks." And on that note -- with a click of his tongue against his teeth which evidently constitutes some form of goodbye -- Erich turns away for the last time and goes tromping off to dispose of the body.

[bedtime for us east coasters! cuz i'm a temporary east coaster!]

[NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN]

The moment slews so very strangely and even after living together for so very long Charlotte shows very little interest in popular culture, in Netflix on Melantha's laptop or Erich's tablet, curls up with them when they want to pile in for movie night as often as not as a wolf, and only becomes a girl when Melantha insists that Charlotte will really, really like this one. Like the time they watched Mulan.

So there they are on the patio beneath the tower that lifts their shrines into the sky, over the crawling pit that they quite nearly died to keep sealed, in the failing twilight.

The business people have all gone home.

Sometimes the lights go on in the building, as the cleaning crews move through the mostly empty offices. Then off again. The building management company is very environmentally conscious. The place does not blaze through the night. The planters are xeriscaped and there are cachements and rainbarrels and solar panels and there might even be a geothermal heating system if there weren't a pit from hell quite literally in the subbasement of the place.

Charlotte's cheeks feel hot.

They are bright little fever points and she takes a breath and another and another and does not quite remember to breathe out. Something about the word squick makes her shoulders tense before he has even moved on to sex and relationships.

And Charlotte trusts Erich implicitly and entirely but:

this hurts,

this hurts,

already this hurts her head.

She is in a room and the walls are closed and the air is closed and there is a - a - a buzzing noise that comes from everywhere and nowhere inside her and when it comes, it never stops.

"I don't - " Charlotte is saying, "I don't - "

"Hey," Erich says,

cuts in, he hopes, as she starts to get that sick look, that green-around-the-gills look, that trapped-in-a-diminishing-room look. "Hey," he says, again, his hand reaching across the table but not touching her, no, some instinct tells him not to do that carelessly right now. "I'm here. You're here. You don't have to do anything. Okay? I just thought maybe it'd help but if it doesn't, if it makes everything worse, you don't have to do anything at all."

[Denver @ 6:22PM

♪♫ Welcome to Dedicated Dicing Den, we've got fun and Charlotte! ♫♪

Charlotte @ 6:22PM

WPRoll: 6 d10 TN7 (1, 1, 3, 3, 7, 7) ( success x 2 ) ]

Charlotte has both the sick look, the green around the gills look, the trapped in a diminishing room look, the world is made of razor blades and arsenic look, and another look entirely. It is just as sick, you must understand. It feels fleshy and wet and ripped-from-the-body but they are wolves and they are monsters and they understand that some things must be ripped from the body.

"I can't - " and she is a little bit breathless, you understand, but, "I can't just talk about it," this is a struggle, even this is a struggle, fighting free of the noise inside her to be here, to be present, to remember that Erich is her pack. She does reach out; brush her mind against his, "without feeling like it's happening again. Like it's happening again and it'll never stop happening and I won't -

"Sometimes it's like quicksand. But if I just think about - about good stuff."

They are pack. Their minds brush together the way their bodies do sometimes, unself-consciously and naturally and amiably. Their minds brush together now, though hers is sick with horror and revulsion and old decay. He shivers a little -- she can see it -- but then he reaches out, reaches back,

brushes her with his mind and with his big hand folding over hers for a second.

"There's so much more good stuff than bad," he says. "Even if the bad is like quicksand, it's like... well it's like a little puddle of quicksand, and you can reach right over and pull yourself out using the nice, uh, the nice grass and stuff next to it." He sucks at metaphors, he thinks.

The truth is, Charlotte jerks her hand back; as if she had just touched a hot stove, a scalding kettle. Her slender fingers, the small knobs of her knuckles, the twists of the friendship bracelets Melantha gave them so long again still knotted there, worn until they have frayed, repaired or perhaps Repaired as often as is possible, and she tries not to let her hand jump when he touches her but they are what they are and and she is what she is and ugh,

another shiver.

And Erich is trying, struggling, reaching to understand, to remind her that all that noise is just noise; is passing; it goes away, every time it goes away, there are good things all around her and she knows it. There is her pack and the moon in the cradle of the sky and the rise of the nightwind and the tinyhouse(s), one rising beside the other high up in the mountains. There is the hunt, and the harrowing, and the prayers at dawn. The ache to howl in her throat, the sharp bite of instinct beneath her skin. The pleasure of bringing down a foe, of tearing them open, of spilling blood and watching it steam in the cool morning air. Of cleansing: making what was Wrong, Right.

And Charlotte listens, and she listens, and she believes him with every part of her mind, except the part that is damaged, which will never believe him, and so she nods agreement: because all these things are true.

Just as: all these things are false, in equal measure.

Charlotte's breathing is still high and tight and fast.

But: she hasn't freaked out.

She hasn't puked.

Perhaps that is progress, of a sort.

Erich's hand darts back nearly as fast as Charlotte's, but it's different. It's different. It's not the way you jerk back from fire, from pain: that instinctive motion, that reflex arc that cuts the brain out of the loop entirely. His: quick, yes, but not as quick. There's a mind there. There's thought. It's the way you jerk back from a wounded animal who just whimpered in pain. Who just, maybe, bared its teeth in warning.

They sit apart, divided by a table. He watches her and she -- she tries to hold it together. After a while he stops looking at her, made ashamed by her trauma. He shouldn't stare.

"Do you wanna -- "

he breaks off. He thinks; seconds tick. He tries again:

"Maybe we can ... maybe we can go run. On the other-side. Up in the mountains. Maybe that'll make you feel better."

There is something odd and wrong and perceptive about Charlotte, sometimes, and that strange face, the hollows of her cheeks, the compressed plane of her features, those huge pale eyes and she is being careful, you see, because things inside of her are very very strange and the world is strange and sometimes it feels as if there were hot little needles pulling together everything wrong, and sometimes the world is too close, too intense, too immediate, and sometimes it is too far away.

Erich at her side, made for savagery, and she is not remembering precisely the first time they walked together, from the GW campus to his car-that-was-his-home and how he made her feel like she were sailing at the prow of a ship, the wind in her face, the way strangers parted for them, but she is aware of it, pricklingly aware, and she is lifting her stubborn little chin.

Gives him a quicksilver smile, the sort that seems to have disappeared before he even becomes aware of it.

"We can run here. Hunt. Warder said there was something he wants us to check out four blocks north. A sink. You wanna?"

Erich: dubious. Charlotte can see it on his face. He begins: "If you think you're -- "

-- and stops. A beat. No, that's the wrong way to go about it, all wrong. If he doubts her, if he doubts her ability and her strength and her self-awareness, the fact that Charlotte herself would tell him if she couldn't -- if he doubts that, then everything else may as well be for naught. He may as well tell her: stop trying to get over your past, because you never will. Stop trying to rise above your madness, because you never can.

He doesn't believe that. Either of that, any of that. He doesn't believe that, and so, after that hesitation, he returns her smile. Small and slight and hesitant, hesitant but growing.

"Yeah." Palm to the floor and a push: he gets up. "Yeah, I wanna."

[OH I SEE HOW IT IS, DENVER.]

In the blink of an eye May has passed and June is around the corner. They've been in Colorado for nearly a year; been up in the mountains most of that time.

As the snows melt, as the cold retreats, they've moved the tinyhouse a little deeper into the wilds again. They're up on a sun-drenched hill today, wildgrass blooming all around, trees rustling with their crowns of leaves all ready for summer. Up here they can look down and see Evergreen not so very far away. Denver proper in the distance: that's a little farther still, hazy in the mid-morning sun. And beyond that, the endless flat of the Great Plains spilling away into the east.

Erich's been working on resealing the tiny cracks and leaks that have appeared on the outer walls and windowframes and doorjambs of the tiny house, a side effect of a winter's worth of punishing freeze and thaw. That's what he's been up to nearly the last two weeks: making Home Depot trips, sanding things, caulking things, repainting and revarnishing things. Making their shared home sound shelter against the coming summer storms.

Today, though, he's taking a break from that. He's sitting out on the porch steps, and he's found a battered old baseball somewhere; he's tossing that old thing straight up into the air and catching it with solid thwacks of leather into palm. Tanned and athletic, winter-darkened hair turning golden again with the light, he's the very essence of Americana -- werewolf edition, of course.

Charlotte sometimes spends pieces of her days with Erich tending to the house. She does this as ritual rather than right. She knows how to use her hands, and watches him work, and learns more, but the secrets of the products he secures and then employs generally remain just that: secrets.

No, she spends more of her time away from the tiny house. Ranging higher up into the mountains, streaking all sleekwhite through the underbrush to find the small lakes laid like jewels in high valleys, to follow the courses of the swollen streams higher and higher, and on and on.

Now she's coming back down, girl-not-wolf, carrying a wooden brace with two trussed jackrabbits dangling from it and one small trout.

Dinner is served.

(Once that stuff is cooked.)

As she appears at the treeline and sees Erich with the baseball, she holds up a hand. Expects him, see, to throw it to her.

Which is what he does, seeing her. Erich stands up, all tall and easy and at home in his skin, cranks back his arm and lets that ball fly. It's a long throw, not some easy underhand lob and not some vicious straight-line fastball either. Just a nice, solid throw, arcing smoothly through the air.

After it leaves his hand he waves at Charlotte. His delicate, diaphanous, wild little sister.

And Charlotte catches the ball a solid SMACK in the center of her palm. Enough to sting. Enough to rattle her delicate bones. Harderly enough to notice.

Her hair is damp with sweat, and dark for it, mostly at the temples, and the bottom third of her jeans are damp and muddied and torn. She looks bright, so clean, healthy, and flashes him a smile, this quick impression of her teeth as he waves and she waves back with the ball in hand then lobs it back and crosses the clearing, Goes to put up the meat and fish 'til they're ready it for, then comes back out, and sits down on the steps beside Erich.

Shoulderbumps him. Familiar, see.

That ball comes sailing back. Erich catches it, nice and solid, and bats it lazily from one hand to the other, grinning as Charlotte grins. Soon enough she's there, climbing the steps up to the porch, and Erich is eyeing those two jackrabbits and that trout with appreciation.

"Nice catch," he says.

She goes in. She comes out. He's still out there, sitting on the steps again, big shoulders and solid back. He's no longer tossing the ball; he's looking into the trees, lost in apparent thought -- eyes narrowed, ball-in-fist propped under his nose like any moment he might start gnawing on it like a dog.

Charlotte drops down next to him. She bumps him, and jars his thoughts back into fluidity. He glances at her, smiling wry-fond, and bumps her back.

"Sept called while you were out," he says. "Northern Sun's back with his pack. They were real glad to see him."

"It would've been easy to stay there, you know?"

Charlotte understands why they didn't send his pack after him. They could've just been a pack together, in their den together, wolves together, with nothing else to worry them as long as ever they may live.

Charlotte is quiet. Quiet and thinking, blond brows quietly furrowed.

"I guess they knew that they could send us, even though we were packmates, 'cos Melantha was waiting for us."

Her mouth curls fond around the name, this quiet, cradling shape. Then the smile melts away, easy as it came.

Charlotte swallows hard.

"Moon's small. Do you still want to talk?"

Erich nods in mute agreement when Charlotte says it would've been easy to stay there. She's right. It would have been easy. Be a pack there. Be a wolf there. Be wild and innocent and carefree in their own private garden of eden,

where they have no names and no memories and no pasts to burden them. He understands that, too. He especially understands why Charlotte would understand: Charlotte, carrying that ugly name of hers like a stone around her neck. He thinks to himself that maybe, maybe if Melantha had been there too, they would have all stayed. Maybe for Charlotte's sake, they would have forsaken the world.

--

Moon's small. Does he want to talk?

Erich lowers the baseball. His forearm over his knee, hand drooping from a lax wrist. His fingers turn the ball over and over, restless, absent. He thinks a moment and then he nods.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "If you think you can."

If you think you can, Erich says, and Charlotte does not think she can. The thought that she can does not exist in her body. It has never come to be. She does not think that she can and the only way she can do it or say it or be here beside Erich with any of that in her skin is by not thinking about it at all.

God her small shoulders are tightly framed beneath her t-shirt her body tense. She watches the ball and she does not think about the baseball and she does not think about anything. There is a beginning that she does not remember and the beginning, the beginning, there are words for the beginning.

They're in her throat.

She could choke on them.

--

Charlotte folds her arms over her knees.

They needed someplace to go. Seemed as good a spot as any.

--

"Nobody knew I was Garou." She starts. This is a kind of truth. Charlotte thinks and most people think that maybe-she-knew. How could you know, then. Adolescent, adolescence, pure as the moon, how could you not remember your wolf-dreams then. "They always thought I was kin. I was - I was supposed to be mated to a Philodox. When I turned sixteen, they had a party for us."

So the story begins. Immediately, within the first five words, Erich thinks maybe he can see the lay of it. And -- he's a little ashamed to realize this -- it relieves him. It wasn't really charaching, he thinks. Not if no one knew. It's not behavior so wildly different from the Charlotte he knows and loves and almost sort of understands. It was just

a misunderstanding.

He thinks.

He listens too, though. Because the story is just starting. He listens, sitting on the steps beside frail silvery-savage Charlotte, and right now -- though he very much wants to -- he knows better than to bump her in affection or support. He lets his silence be a sort of support. And his presence.

Erich's relieved. Charlotte does not know that Erich is relieved. The truth does not relieve her. Her throat is tight and so is her body, and she is sitting forward now, all stark, with her pale head bowed and the pressure inside her head so insistent. So, so insistent that she isn't sure whether or not her ears might melt or leak or something,

something.

"Wasn't supposed to be until I was eighteen. But his pack was going to the Deep Umbra and maybe not coming back. So they said we had to - "

Charlotte is frowning, curled not toward Erich, if she is curled at all, but Away.

Her voice is getting smaller. She does not know or understand this.

"so we did. And I - "

And she does not say, got pregnant or any of a million slang terms to Erich, cannot say them, cannot think them. The brief lacuna in the story must stand in for the actual words she cannot say.

Her voice is even smaller.

"Then a few months later I changed."

Madness. That's all she can comprehend of it was the madness. The confusion, the rage, the pain.

So much for relief. Soon as it breaks over him -- secret, shameful, he should love Charlotte no matter what she's done and he does but he was still relieved to know it was an accident, just an accident, just an unhappy turn of fate --

soon as it breaks over him it's gone. Because then she says: they said we had to.

And it's not relief, then. It's shock and horror and something very much like rage, but deeper and blacker and more... more aware. More purposeful, less instinctive. It is anger; it is fury. He squeezes that baseball very tightly. In his mind's eye he sees its stitches straining; he imagines it bursting open like rotten fruit. He drops the ball and flexes his fingers and takes a slow breath.

"That's not your fault," he says. "None of that is your fault. They should've never made you guys. That's just ... that's really messed up."

A few beats.

"What happened then?"

Erich hears it differently. Erich hears it not quite correctly. Erich hears: they said we had to and squeezes the baseball as if it were the head of an enemy that he could crush with his sheer strength.

Charlotte is frowning, still, she shakes him off when he tells her that none of that is your fault. Shakes the thought off and shakes her pale head and shakes, perhaps. Vibrates, see, on some wavelength that is half trauma, half madness. And she has to correct him because he's wrong, he's wrong, he's wrong -

Her voice is oh-so-tight.

"They said we had to get mated sooner because he might die on his quest. After that I - I - " oh, it makes her so ill. "I wanted to."

"...oh."

And then Erich is quiet for a while. At a loss. Not sure what to say to that. Quiet and quiet and quiet and then:

lifting his head, looking over at her.

"Well, you didn't know," he says quietly. "And there's nothing wrong with wanting to with your mate. I mean. There'd be something wrong if you didn't." Another small pause. "Is that why you just... don't want to anymore, ever?"

"I don't," Charlotte starts, and stops. She is hung-up on the word, she is skewered by the thought. It turns over inside her skin and makes her - makes her -

makes her -

"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know." There is something terrible about the repetition. Something underlying. Something that is secured to itself by a hinge, somehow. Some door, opening. "I don't know. I don't know."

Or maybe the repetition is instead an orderliness. A defense against the dark, the way her insistent innocence must be. The way her strangeness, her lightness, must also be.

Charlotte does not want to talk about it. She does not want to talk about it with Erich. She does not know how to say that to Erich, who is her brother and her friend. The words turn all to slime in her throat.

"It didn't end. It didn't ever end." Just imagine the trauma of the first change: all that rage, all that confusion - enduring. Enduring. Once she changed, she could not change back. "I should've known. What I was. When he came back he hated me. Still hates me.

"Everyone did. 'Cept Lauren, and she died.

"And Chas. And you and Melantha."

She doesn't know. She doesn't know. She doesn't know. She doesn't --

by the fourth repetition Erich is alarmed; is reaching out to her, laying a heavy and warm hand on her shoulder. "Hey. Hey. It's okay."

Maybe she tears herself away. Maybe she curls into a ball. Maybe she goes still, stock-still, terribly still. Erich -- his hand lifts almost as soon as it alights. And they are quiet for a while, and then she is speaking again, and --

"Nobody hates you here," he says softly. "Not me, not Melantha, not Chas, not anyone in the Sept. They all like you and respect you. You know that, don't you?"

Charlotte does jerk herself away. Those stiff narrow shoulders. She cannot stand to be touched in that moment. Not by him. Certainly not by Erich -

"They don't know."

"True," Erich admits. "But I know. Melantha knows. We will like you. And respect you. And love you.

"I'm not saying you should go announce it to all and sundry. But ... I think even if people found out, they'd still like you. Those of them whose opinions are worth caring about, anyway."

"I hate it." There is no staying still. The creature rises, and oh, she is lovely, and oh, she is feral, and oh, she is mad. She stalks even in this meager human form. The wolf coursing beneath her skin is a livid, living thing. "I hate it. I hate all of them. When I see one - "

An arrest, see.

She is flushed scarlet.

There are pieces of herself that she can never reconcile.

Erich deserves, at the very least, this: to know all of them.

This time the pause is longer; a little more awkward. This time Erich doesn't have an easy answer available. Easy forgiveness. Easy out.

"You shouldn't," is all he manages to muster in the end. "It's not their fault what their parents did. And ... maybe it's not always their parents' fault either, the way it wasn't really your fault."

Pause. Pause. Silence.

"I think maybe ... maybe you hate them so much because you're actually kinda hating yourself. I think you really blame yourself, Charlotte, and way more than you should."

There is wisdom in what he says. Of course there is. It is a kind of human wisdom that everything that is pure-in-her cannot fathom, or even despises in its way. Perhaps, too, it is a sort of moon-blooded wisdom, that she is too young to see now, or too mad to ever see.

But listen: Charlotte looks up. Is it twilight? Was it twilight when all this started, Erich on the steps leading to the tinyhouse, baseball in hand, evening lowering itself like a southern belle over the mountains. This long slow curtsey into dusk.

When she returned from the woods with rabbits and a trout, beneath that slivered moon, that small moon, that silvered moon, to share with her pack.

Looks up and meets his eyes.

Usually that look is human; that instinct is human. Wolves lock gazes when they mean to challenge, when they insist on asserting dominance, and there is no hierarchy in the pack, no as such.

But listen: she meets Erich's eyes, not as a girl, but as a wolf.

There is madness in her own, that he cannot obviate or expiate. A devouring sort that creates its own echo chamber of sorts, that fills her head up with noise whenever her heart starts to pound so.

She wants to - she yearns to - what is it? Give him this. Let go. But she can't.

She can't.

"I can't stop. It makes me sick. It makes my head hurt. I'm sorry. I can't make it stop."

--

Charlotte is already changing, into something bright and pure and untainted: a wolf.

She can't make it stop. Cannot accept whatever comfort or wisdom he wants to give her. Cannot be: right, or well, or good, or stable.

Instead, this. A wordless brush of her mind against his: an invitation - to run.

"I know," says Erich, very quietly.

It is the last thing he says for a while. Charlotte is already changing; not to be left behind, Erich stands, and the baseball forgotten in his hand finally drops from his fingers to roll, to stop.

He drops forward too. Strikes the ground on his hands, which are now paws, shakes some clothes free and absorbs others into his very pelt. By then Charlotte is a stone's throw away, but he is fast, and he is following, and his big paws eat up the ground.

It is easier like this: no words, no human thoughts. He runs after his sister, wild as she is, reminded suddenly of the day they met:

don't you ever want to --

just leap. just tumble. just twist and bound to feel the strength and youth and power in your own bones. don't you want to just run free.

He does. And so he does.

[1. There is no post order, but please post only once for each post I make unless I indicate otherwise.

2. Post in 15 minutes or less, and declare/roll in 2 minutes or less. "In 15 minutes" means 15 minutes from my post, not the last player to post before you. If you miss your roll it will be skipped. In character this means it automatically fails. And that kinda sucks. :[

3. You are free to multi-task, so long as you can abide by the above strictures. If you repeatedly miss 'deadlines' or are unresponsive in the scene chat, I will ask you to excuse yourself from this scene (or the other) out of respect for my time and the time of our fellow players.

4. This is a very low-risk scene both psychologically and physically.

5. Please PM me now with personal phobias, triggers, or off-limits themes (if none, no need to tell me 'none'). If you're uncomfortable with anything in the scene, IM me once (outside of the chat). If you become uncomfortable/distressed due to content in the scene and need to immediately leave, please IM or email me as soon as you are able to let me know. I don't actually enjoy upsetting my players. Just their characters.

6. Please PM me now with any relevant merits/flaws/traits I should be aware of. If none, no need to tell me 'none'.

7. Keep track of your own health and tempers. Ain't nobody got time for that. Except you. What I mean is: I do not have time for that.

8. Ask questions in the AIM chat. If I don't answer after 2-3 minutes, ping me once in PMs here. In review: AIM chat for chatter and questions, IMs for personal distress, Jove PMs for questions I have not answered within a few minutes.

9. Don't be a dick.

10. Don't forget to be awesome.]

When the sun set today, it blazed through the freshly renewed boughs of the trees, a baleful red circle both drawing and repelling the eye. Everything in sight was cast in a heavy crimson glow, the edges gilded with flaming orange. There seemed to be no break between the edge of the sun and the lines where branches and leaves should be; the world went silent for this sunset, though it flinched with dread.

When the heat grows too searing to bear, you go north. When the itch of summer's heat makes the skin crawl, you go north. You begin heading that way without quite understanding why or how; you find yourself knowing deep into the journey that you will never make it far enough to escape the heat. It seems that a great deal of time has passed, leaving you in autumn now. The leaves here are enormous: veiny orange and brown things the size of the trees they should have come from, standing tall and straight from yellowed grass, fluttering in wind that should be cold but is only hot, dry, and unforgiving.

You have been walking for -- you do not know how long. From where, you do not know, or why. There are people alongside you: three others. You do not know them, or their names. You realize: you do not know your own name. You think, looking upon the forest ahead, that there was a wall before, a low one, maybe around a portico or veranda. You're not sure. It was stone, you think. You're not sure. The sunset was red and unmerciful; you came north, and now the grass is yellow underfoot, there are leaves the size of trees, and you are with strangers and you do not know how long you have been walking with them, or they with you.

You know this: go north. You know this: you are with strangers. You know this: you are a werewolf, and your skin and bones will change shape around you, but you do not know for what purpose. You know this the way that perhaps an ant knows it is an ant, a dog knows it is a dog, a bird knows it is a bird. There is no need to question it, no need for cumbersome mythology. You are a mammal, and this is the type of mammal you are. You know that leaves are not usually that large, even if you do not know if every sunset is always so red, so disquieting, or just the one you remember.

You know that it is night now, the sky darkened, the stars and moon above. You like the moon. You do not know why, but even as thin as it is, the sight of it fills you at once with hopeful joy and maddening anger that itches at the back of your mind. You like the moon very much.

You think: the moon likes me, too.

When the sun set today this one thought he had plenty of reason to stay where he was. Now the heat sinks into his fur and it can't roll off his tongue fast enough to cool the rest of him but he does not stop. If he had stopped he would not be here.

He accepts the strangers as he accepts the heat and the leaves and the yellow grass. This is nothing more than what it is. He knows that dark speckled through with light means the moon is here.

Part of this one wants to run to catch up with the beckoning north. He has been walking with the others this long. He does not hasten to leave them yet.

He sniffs the grass and when he's done he lifts his muzzle to the night air. Maybe it will tell him something.

Oh, she's a rare thing. A rare rare thing, fine and pale as that slivered moon she loves so well, nothing like that the baleful light of that setting sun, those too-large leaves. The wall and the sun and the wall and the trees had an ancient sort of familiarity, see. She can taste them, somehow, on or beneath her tongue. Belongs in places like this, even if she does not know what this place is or where it might be, or that there are other places like this: any of it. Walls though, walls and grounds that are groomed, with sweeping views, well ordered though not - never - tamed.

Listen: a pale girl, slender and finely made given weight by the many imperatives and attachments of her blood is among the quartet.

She is wearing her girl-skin and this she does not mind. She can feel her wolf-skin beneath her girl-skin and this she does not mind either.

Somehow she is both aware of this mindlessness and aware of it as a relief right? A letting-go. She remembers so little she has forgotten even her madness,

and glances at the stranges who are human-strangers and wolf-strangers and says,

"Hello." Smiles, see? How strange it is to speak.

She likes it, though not so well as the moon. "I want to follow her," the moon, the girl means, with a lilting glance upwards through the too-large leaves to the slivered moon in the darkling sky. " - I wonder where she sleeps."

She is walking along in two legs, because that is how Keisha normally walks. Her staff at her side, her sandals on her feet and a simple green sarong dress covering her. She doesn't know why she's walking this way or who she's walking with, and perhaps that sudden realization when it hits (whyever it hits) troubles her, because she stops and frowns. Her attention turns to the moon, who she likes and who likes her, and then around to the other strangers. Her hands grip the wood of her staff and then she realizes that she has a staff. She looks at it, examines the carvings that she began on it upon making her new one (which she doesn't remember she had an old one).

She looks to the wolf, the woman and the other, and takes a breath. She nods, smiles a little. "Hello. Do any of us know who we are?"

Because it's a valid question. And as she asks, she's walking again, heading northward where they want to go.

Amongst their number is a boy who walks beside the girl. He is very different from her, broad where she is slender, strong where she is fine, golden and ruddy where she is silver and white. Something about them is nonetheless similar, as though they were two shoots off the same root; hybrid stalks grafted to the same stem.

It does not bother him very much that he does not know who he is or where he is or why he is. He is, and this is enough for him. As they walk the heat of the day begins to fall away, layer by layer. He looks at the moon and smiles, because he likes the moon very much, because the moon likes him too.

The silver girl speaks: he turns to look at her, his smile widening. "Me too," he agrees, and then:

the other girl speaks, the one who is not silver and white but amber and brown. There is one other in their quartet, another boy, another who is dusky and dark. The boy looks around at the four of them and he sees that he is the largest, and he thinks this must mean he is strongest, and he thinks this must mean he is to protect the others. Of course. That makes sense.

He turns to the dark girl; he seems puzzled and a little amused.

"What a strange question. We are us and we follow the moon."

They know things about themselves. Or feel them, like a pulse that one doesn't notice until you touch your wrist, your throat: the willingness to go into the unknown, and permit the unknown, and keep the unknown's secrets with it if necessary. The call of kingship, how easy it is to be the first to say this is what I want to do. The urge to protect. They feel themselves, their own humor and their own passion, but they are like half-buried boxes, and you are not sure what is inside.

A small dark spot from the sky grows larger, growing closer, and then grows wings, and alights on Erich's shoulder. It is a bird. You know it is a bird, and even: a pigeon. You are a werewolf and that is a pigeon. It has eyes as bright as gemstones, as smooth as riverstones. It hops a bit, and coos, and flutters its wings, then pushes off and circles, flying to Charlotte, working its beak in her hair. And this pigeon is known to the two of them, and is as much a friend as the moon is, but it has no name. Perhaps it never has.

Perhaps they never have.

Up ahead, dark-furred creature, there is a gate. Only a gate, standing between two stone posts. The gate is wrought, and rusted. The stone posts are covered in signs. You can read them: KEEP OUT. NO TRESSPASSING. and so on. You know what those words mean. And you know how strange they are, because to either side of the stone posts there is no fence, no wall. The gate is chained shut. You know this, now:

THIS IS THE ONLY WAY FORWARD. BUT THE GATE DOESN'T WANT YOU TO GO THROUGH.

She frowns at Hector; no, not even frowns. She scowls a little bit. It's a rebuke, even if light-hearted, and this is not the Keisha who is calm and gentle. That Keisha was gained through certain experiences, and she doesn't have those. She has no knowledge that she's "supposed" (in her own estimation) to act older than she is, and so she gives him a harsh look.

"There's no such thing as a strange question, or a normal one. There are only questions. The answers are what are strange or not."

She watches the pigeon as it circles around Charlotte and Erich, and not her or the other. She wonders about it, but only for a second because there's a gate up ahead. And for this Keisha, "Keep Out" and "No Trepassing" may as well be a big neon sign reading COME THIS WAY.

So that's what she does; she cocks her head to the side and starts walking to the gate itself, intending to try to scale it.

"Hello," says the silver girl quietly to the pigeon and her hello sounds a bit like hello and a bit like a responsive cooing. It is smooth in her throat but there is an edge to it that you cannot quiet comprehend unless you know something of the alient beasts from which such animals descended. She does not know such things and yet:

she does. The sharp and alien eye. The darting directness. The delicate savagery.

No quarter here.

--

That is how she looks at the gate. The gate the gate the gate that bars the way and keeps her from the place where she must go.

The girl does not like the chains and does not like the signs and she walks beside the boy with an unconscious certainty and she smiles at the beast and there is something benevolent about this but also assured and she smiles at the girl and agrees with the golden boy.

Here is a secret: already she knows that she does not miss her name. Feels that secret like something organic in her chest.

She glances at the golden boy, alert see.

She knows he will back her up,

when something comes,

and something always comes,

and the signs do not belong there, and how dare they bar her way.

So, she begins tearing them down. Bare hands.

And the male wolf the only one who left his home on four legs can feel in his bones that he could stand on two if he wanted but why would he want to when the ears he has now catches flapping wings before that dark spot takes on a form. He doesn't. His ears and his eyes and his nose and the moon are all good as they are.

They come to a pause and he stands alongside the other male without knowing why. Scents the airs and sees the gate and chuffs out a low firm noise: there. Not harrying or herding the others.

If he is fast he does not move so fast as to leave them behind. No question in his mind and he voices no question and what voice he has he keeps to himself.

He goes around the gate.

A pigeon comes. And the boy knows the pigeon, even as he knows his own self, his bones, his strength. He is happy to see the pigeon, and the pigeon is happy to see him. It alights on his shoulder. He kisses it on its small, sleek-feathered head. It is a meek, pretty bird, neither ferocious nor even particularly intelligent, but it is adoring and loyal and terribly good with directions.

It goes to play with the silver girl. The boy smiles again to see it go.

He doesn't smile to see the gate, though. It bars their way, even if there is no fence, no wall. The wolf moves to go around it, but the boy hangs back: an eye on the silver girl, ready to defend. An eye on the gate, with its air of forbidding and foreboding both.

"Be careful," he calls to the wolf.

One will climb the gate that says you must stay out, and one will tear down the signs that say you must stay out, and one will go around the gate that you must not go around, and one will hang back, perhaps obeying the gate that says you must obey it.

The pigeon lifts from the pink-haired female's shoulder, rising upward, landing to perch on the stone post.

This is what they get, for their troubles:

The gate should not be hard to climb, and it is not. The gate might be painful to climb, and it is. Her feet get stuck. Her hands sting and cut as she grabs hold of rusted metal. Her feet slip, too. She bangs her chin on the iron. The gate rattles under her weight as though it would collapse, but it does not. It just shakes her loose, shakes her down a few inches.

The paper tears easily, as paper does. The metal signs bend and with enough prying will come loose, but they take chunks of stone with the screws and nails that hold them in place. They do come off. The posts start to stop saying KEEP OUT STAY OUT quite so vehemently, as those messages tatter to the stomped-upon grass.

Around the stone post he finds himself looking from a new direction at the one female climbing, the other female tearing, the other male standing watch. Round and round and round and round, a door that is the same on both sides.

The pigeon looks at the boy hanging back. Cocks its head and flies back, but it does not fly over the gate. It cannot. There are laws here, you see, as efficacious as gravity.

She makes a hissing sound (as you do) as her hands are cut and she slips down off the wall with a frown. Looks at the gate, and the chains that bind it shut to them. She examines the lock, looks at the gate itself, furrows her brow.

"We need to find a key." She looks around at the others, up to the moon. Her friends (because she assumes they are friends, even if she doesn't know them). "Some way to get the lock open and get through, or we won't be able to pass."

When the signs are pulled away, what are left are the chains. The chains that bar it and the doors that they secure that bar the way, properly.

And the pink-haired girl tears away the signs that say GET OUT STAY OUT because how dare they bar her and then she grabs the chains and she looks at the golden boy and she is a BEAST she knows this in her bones and she tells him,

tells them, really:

(and when she tells them she is no longer a pink-haired girl. She is large, larger, she remembers not why or what she is, but that there is a strength in her body that remains untapped.)

tells - perhaps - Keisha most of all:

"You're stronger than you look. Help me tear it down."

The boy is, indeed, hanging back. There is that about him: a sense of shyness, nevermind that he is large and well-muscled and has fists that look as though they might easily bash walls to rubble. He watches the others tackle the gate: climbing it and getting hurt for the trouble (though perhaps the sting to the pride is worse than the sting to the body); ripping the signs down; walking around it

and instantly rounding the other post, as though there is no world to either side of the gate.

The pigeon comes back to him. The boy reaches an absent hand up and scritches it under its small beak. Then he walks up to the gate, behind the silver girl and to one side of her, looking at her handiwork.

"Maybe she's right," he says to the silver girl, meaning the earthen girl. "Maybe we need to find a key. I can try, though,"

and so speaking, the golden boy abruptly bursts fur from skin, grows to an enormous and shaggy thing. He grips the gate in both handpaws and pulls as hard as he can; leans backward to leverage his weight, muscles knotted like ropes under that thick fur.

Only once does the wolf circle the gate before he sniffs the air and goes around the gate again and keeps moving north. He takes with him a warning from the upright male and he gives back a whuff of agreement.

Maybe she's right. Maybe they need to find a key.

As the others work to overcome the gate the wolf trots on ahead. He does not think the gate does or does not mean anything. It is a gate and it wore a sign and it has done nothing yet to keep him from moving around it so he keeps moving past it.

There are many signs. The one with pink hair pauses in the tearing, has to pause, to tell the others what she does. When she changes, grows, becomes the strength and awe-inspiring beauty that is in all of her kind, even the ones who have forgotten it.

you are stronger than you look

They begin to use their bodies, power surging up from the earth through them as they change and tear and pull. The pigeon flies away, and into the sky, and vanishes again for a while, forgetting itself. There is no getting around the gate, for one circles. Going past it, one finds oneself passing another stone post on the other side, coming to discover the three others still standing there.

They look, perhaps, in the grass or the stone, pulling at bricks or looking in the lock itself, but there is no key to be found. The gate cannot be broken, which is a sting to the ego: it is so fragile, so rusted, so old, so brittle. They are so strong.

[wits + engimas time]

[[Wits+Enigmas]]

Dice: 6 d10 TN6 (1, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9) ( success x 3 ) [WP]

[hokay, so....]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 10, 10) ( success x 4 )

[derp]

Dice: 4 d10 TN6 (2, 4, 6, 7) ( success x 2 )

Wits + enigmas

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9) ( success x 3 )

The gate is infuriating. The gate stands between her and where she was meant to go. She wants to be on the other side of it. She wants to cross. She wants to tear it down. She wants to tear it open; it looks like it should be easily ripped asunder,

and still it remains standing.

So they hunt; for a key instead of prey. Beneath her skin and in the back of her beast-mind she knows that one is not the other but the instinct remains the same: to hunt, to seek, to range. This is right and proper and the itch of it is a fine thing beneath her skin until again,

there is no key.

They cannot climb it and they cannot tear it down and they cannot circle it and still the gate blocks the way and this is the way they were meant to go and she opens her mouth and she snarls her frustration and her tongue lolls in her muzzle as she looks at the moon in the dark-velvet sky and she lowers her great head and she sinks from her beast-form to her girl form and she considers the gate again, and all the others.

And then the gate, and oh,

well.

The pink-haired girl, she knocks.

Knock-knock-knock, see? Let me in.

Well, it's almost as though they've switched it right around, isn't it? Now the silver girl is knocking meekly and the golden boy is:

well, he is not a golden boy, for one. He is a shaggy wolf-monster, and he is enormous and his paws are enormous and there's all that fur and the heat that radiates off him feels like a sun in miniature. And for another: he is not meekly watching anymore but tearing at the signs himself, as though falling back on this option now that the others have been exhausted.

Or his arms. At least his arms are exhausted. From pulling.

Your blood sings in your own ears. You are pure. You are bright and strong. Things call to you, yestheydoHAHAHAHA and they are cold and angry and bitter and painful things, scary things, but right here there are others, whose blood is not so bright whose voices are not so pure, but they are with her. The large one sometimes listens.

There is no key on the ground or in the lock. She tore down the signs though. The voice yelling KEEP OUT in those bright glaring letters has quieted. She can make it quieter.

She frowns and walks away from the gate, not having shifted form and instead having just pulled with her own strength. Why? Because that's who Keisha is.

Instead, she looks down at the posters and signs and starts shifting through them. No Trespassing. Keep Out. There's a furrowing of her brow as she starts to look for something between the overt messages.

Something Deeper.

"Let me pass."

Not merely the knock, then.

The knock is an imperial knock, a knock of courtesy. The greeting of one shining thing to whatever abides beyond the gate. The knock is the knock is the knock is what it is.

She knocks. She says, again, "Let me pass."

--

And, then, like the boy, she resumes tearing down the signs.

Let them all fall down.

When the male wolf comes back around the gate the final time he does as his bones bid him do and slips out of a skin made for long distances. Running and howling. The grass is different beneath his feet and the clothes he wears and the metal around his fingers hung around his neck punched through his ear don't mean anything to him.

The wolf was lithe and sharp and tan of fur with brown and red and gray run along its spine but the boy who joins the others is near as tall as the other. Thinner and darker. His hair falls down past his shoulders and he wears all black clothing. A hunting knife on one side of his belt and a medicine bag on the other.

He looks like a shaman maybe but he isn't.

He helps the silver girl and the golden boy take down the last of the signs and when the last of the signs is on the ground he glances to the others. At the girl with the staff in particular.

It is not a large gate. He is not the one to test its compliance. He's watching.

One pulls at the signs. Stupid little signs! They aren't iron or stone. Just aluminum, just paper, just cardboard. Plastic! One tears at them, til his arms are worn out from it. They are stacked and staggered.

One peers at the signs. Stupid little signs! They are thin and their words are shallow. KEEP OUT. STAY OUT. NO TRESPASSING. Variations on a theme. Some in different languages. They, unlike the gate that is meant to be walked through but is locked, do not obfuscate their intentions.

One tears at the signs. Stupid little signs! Don't they know who she is? Nevermind that she doesn't know who she is. She knows what she is. They all know what they are. She rips. The gate, being a gate, does not answer her any other way.

One takes down the signs. Stupid little signs. Stupid signs, man-made, man-lettered. Gates are symbols like walls are symbols, like giant leaves are symbols. Those might be as native as the leaves, the trees. The signs came from something else, had to have, because they have words. You never read in dreams, they say, that's not the part of your brain that works. Maybe that's a lie, to comfort you, a totem like in that movie, right? Something you can count on to assure you that you are only dreaming. Well nevermind: he knows these things, and he knows that gates are made for walking through, and signs are just spells you attempt to cast on the people who read them. He knows: spells only work on you if you believe in their magic.

--

The stone posts have holes in them, screws and nails. Bits of tape. There is a veritable cloud of signage at their feet by the end. And the gate is not rusted, they must have imagined that, and there is no chain and no lock, because the gate just stands there, the wrought iron clean and dark. It looks like it is made of soot; if you breathed on it, the particles would scatter. But touching it, it feels cold.

Iron often does. Even in summer, late summer, after a baleful sunset.

In the distance, wind moves through the trees, the giant leaves. It sounds like a sigh. A waking sigh, or a relieved sigh. The woods shudder.

The first to put their hand on the gate finds it swinging easily inward, as though it was always meant to swing inward, welcoming and unafraid. It doesn't even creak, and the landscape beyond does not change. The world is no different. Only their perception of the barriers within it.

The signs go away. The rust and tarnish goes away. All that's left in the end is a gate, powder-black and perfect, and looking at the gate the boy suddenly understands that gates are meant to be barriers, yes, but they are meant also to be portals. You can go through such things.

And this gate: it opens, as it is meant to do. Now the way is open. There is a forest; there are giant, giant, giant leaves. Maybe they are small. Maybe they have been made small by the innocence of their own minds. Their names, their lives; wiped clean. What remains is who they are, who they really are outside of those artificial and self-imposed walls, strictures, boundaries.

The boy is still a boy. He is still brave and a little shy, bright-souled, ill-considered, sometimes blundering. He looks at the open way and then he glances at the others, three of them. Then he walks through, the first step cautious, the next easier. Presently, he reduces from his monstrous form: becomes a hulking near-boy, then a boy.

"Oh." The pink-haired girl says, after.

"Oh," listen to the note of surprise in her voice. Listen to the way it enfolds itself into something deeper and more feral, girl-surprise giving way to wolf-noise because the gait is open,

the way is open.

There are dark things everywhere.

It is dark.

There are strange dark things inside her but she is around them too, bright as the moon will be when it is full; bright as that sliver that tastes like a sickle and curves like coy lover's smile.

She is a girl and then she is a wolf because she is girl-and-wolf, she is werewolf and she folds down to four legs and she lolls her tongue and looks at the others and barks.

It sounds like an invitation.

The gate is open. Time to run.

The gate swings open. Gates are meant to keep out so much as they are meant to permit entry and maybe it's starting to come back to him. This reflection of lies in the shadows of a life he didn't take in with him. If it does he stands silent anyway. Accepts it same as he accepted the drawing north and the too-large leaves and the red that was so red it bled into everything else.

Now the silver girl goes to her wolf skin and he does not smile. He does not join her. Long distance covered on four legs already and now he is stood back and watching.

"Alright," he says to the wolf-girl. The first word he's spoken since they regained cognizance.

He steps through the gate.

She looks from the signs up to the gate as the last of them are torn down and the gate is swung open. Well. She seems kind of silly now.

She frowns and stands, and follows them through.

The field is not vast. The golden grass is not endless. They are within a few moments, even less, of the trees, which

get smaller as they get closer, running or walking. The leaves are the right size. The trees are not. Things are coming back to them, like a voice that is and is not familiar:

"-- been gone a long time now.""How long is a long time?"

The golden, blue-eyed one hears himself ask. They all hear him ask it, if they remember.

"Almost two years."

There are other voices, their own voices -- protests, questions. Two years! How!

"It was before River died."

Oh, they remember a little there, at that name which is a thing found in nature and so it can be permitted. They remember someone dying. Death is a bad, sad, maddening thing. Death hurts very much. Some of them were not here when it happened. They know there was death. That's what is behind them, very very very very very very far behind them. Other things, too, but lots of death. And River, whoever River was, River died and maybe, maybe everything bad happened after that. Maybe whatever was lost was forgotten, at least temporarily.

"Keep these talismans,"

says someone else entirely, not the deep timbre of the first voice, not one of their own. They don't know what the talismans are. Or what they're for. They don't know what they have on them is familiar and what isn't. Is the staff a talisman? Is the bead, the metal piercing, the pigeon? But someone told them to keep them. Whatever they were.

--

The trees are very small, and the leaves are the right size.

They come upon a clearing, which to them is the size of a boot-heel. Something is in the middle. Something small and shining and curled up and sleeping and thumping its tail in its sleep and with red-gold fur and twitching ears. Very very small, and smelling of autumn, smelling of barley in the wind and smelling -- for here such things have a scent -- of music. Something dreaming.

A little wolf. Tiny enough to fit in the palm of even the pink-haired one's hand.

The moon likes him, too.

Does she have pink-hair here, too? In this form. She runs and they run through the gate and things change and the horizon comes closer and recedes. The trees are too large and then very small and the leaves are the right size and that is enough. There are scents in the air and they are vibrant as a anything, they are a chord that strikes some note of familiarity in the fibers of the muscle of her heart.

The trees open up and here is a clearing and there is a very, very, very,

very,

small wolf.

It could fit in her hand but she does not have hands.

She has paws.

She lopes closer, closer.

The moon likes him. Her nose is warm. She wuffs and nuzzles the dreaming little wolf. Smells his music.

They all hear and they all remember and they all know death to be a thing that doesn't go away. It's there waiting for all of them just as wakefulness waits at the end of a dream but all dreams end eventually.

This one's hands are heavy with all the jewelry he wears. He walks light on his feet. Even as the echoes come back at him and them he walks through the field and he listens to the voices. Glances over at the other male once. Says nothing.

Talismans?

And here the clearing. Here something small enough to trot upon if attention doesn't come before the step. He sees and he scents the air though he stands on two legs and he stands idle frowning but not confused.

He crouches at the edge of the clearing and does not mean to disturb the sleeping wolf but how is he to know his presence won't be a disturbance.

She doesn't understand what's going on. Memories, some that she may recall, are coming back to her and she is confused. So she goes with the others and she looks at the small wolf. She drops into a crouch, reaches out gently to touch her lightly.

With a wet nose coming close, the tiny wolf's ears flicker. She is enormous, compared to him; her tiny nuzzle rocks his entire body. It makes him open one eye, peering at her drowsily, but without fear. A shadow swoops overhead; the pigeon is the size of an eagle. Maybe they are small. Maybe the light plays tricks, maybe the bird is closer than it seems.

No matter. They remember:

shadows tearing at them in some other wood, a darker wood far from here, more to the south. God, how far have they come? Ripping at their clothes, raking claws into their skins, wounding their souls more than their bodies. How did they survive such an attack? Flashes of light, bursts of water over their flesh from shattered something-somethings. They tore -- they tore something away from all of them, and they wandered on, less hurt and less bloodied but

something was happening to them, as they walked. So gradually they didn't even notice.

It's easy to forget the most important things. You just have to keep going.

--

The wolf thumps his tail as he is woken. He snorts and stretches and rolls up onto his feet, spry. He wags his tail to see them, barks. And they understand:

"HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK."

The silver girl becomes a silver wolf, and the silver wolf runs ahead. See her go, like a bolt of silk let loose. That swift, that smooth. The boy follows, at first walking, then breaking into a trot, then running outright himself. On two legs instead of four he is not as fast as a wolf, but he is fast: fast and strong and athletic, blessed in raw and physical ways by the moon who likes him.

The trees grow small and small and smaller still. This does not quite seem to make sense to the boy, but then: nothing really makes sense. Things are beginning to come back to him, an existence before this one nudging at the corners of his consciousness. In a way it lifts the simple contentment of ignorance; it makes him, for the first time, begin to wonder

who am i?

where am i?

why am i?

But then they are at the clearing, which is tiny as a palmprint. They gather around and look down and there is a wolf there, a tiny wolf, curled up and dreaming. The silver wolf nuzzles the little wolf; the dark girl touches it. The dark boy does not touch it, and neither does the golden boy.

--

The little wolf wakes. Another piece of the past comes back to them. The boy blinks suddenly, and his brow creases with a frown that looks and feels odd, new, out of place. He rubs his face for a moment. He looks down and the little wolf is wagging his tail up at them now, telling them all that

THEY WILL BE A PACK

and the boy understands this to be a good thing, a happy thing, though he does not quite understand. "Okay?" he says, uncertainty making the word a question. He thinks for a moment. "You're very small. Do you want to ride on my shoulder like my pigeon?"

Speaking of which: where is his pigeon?

Charlotte (she does not know that she is Charlotte, but somehow she knows that she has a name now, a name that belongs to her the way the name River belongs to -

belongs to -

names below to things. So, Charlotte thinks that the small wolf does not want to ride the small wolf wants to run wolves were meant to run not ride.

HELLO. WE WILL BE A PACK.

the small wolf barks and she barks back, and there is a spiraling sort of brightness to her tone that begins to shade itself into a howl, a paean, a ululating song.

It is worldless. It does not have a name.

After all that darkness, some part of her knows, or believes, that this is a better way to be.

Here. Now.

The memories, they flash and they hurt. They pain her, emotionally and spiritually and she flinches as they come to her. But they are just memories. "Just." Right.

More importantly, the wolf awakes, and it is happy to see them. It says they will be a pack. Does it feel like it shouldn't be? Like she has something that fills that? She isn't sure. Maybe. But for now, because it makes the little wolf so happy, she smiles.

She does not say yes though. Just smiles.

They came here for a reason. They came her to find something lost, lost for almost two years. They came with talismans to protect them against something, but those talismans were torn from their very bodies. They are themselves, and they have purpose, and they are in... the spirit world. They are in a place with its own standards that defy both natural law and the inexorable rules of logic. They find a gate made to open and trying to keep them out, and they think

someone made those signs.

They find something that must be lost, look how small he is, look how delighted he is for the company. Look at him wagging his tail, growing foot-sized from palm-sized, now he is up to their knees. He is very excited, his eyes bright gold, the autumnal light gilding the edges of his fur. What a pretty thing he is, and the tall golden one says okay to the pack idea, and tells him he is small.

"I AM GROWING!" he barks back, not in anger but excitement. "SO WE CAN BE PACK."

They all have names. Not easy to find, it's right on the tip of your tongue, but you can remember ... the W... the War... the Warder. The Warder in a cold place, not summery at all, telling them to go north. No, he said to cross over, to find what was lost. They know this. They all have names, and cannot recall their own, but the name of this lost little one is coming back to them, slowly, slowly.

Maybe it starts with a B. There's an N in there somewhere.

He wags. Cocks his head to the side. "WE ARE A PACK. THIS IS OUR DEN. HELLO."

He is waist-high now.

He is growing. He is growing so-fast and he is growing SO WE CAN BE PACK and she barks-back and remembers the W- W- Warder, the places-that-were and the darkness. Here are names too.

She is beginning to remember names too.

She remembers, you see, that she has a name.

That she does not want a name.

--

Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. This is the rhythm when she returns to the small-wolf. Nuzzle, nuzzle, nip. Familiarity, comfort, challenge. Comfort, affection, challenge.

She barks again. He is growing!

And for now they are a pack.

BARK.

But this is not their den.

When he is done growing, she knows, they have to go.

Wefindyou. she tells him. Comefollowus.

She tells him.

Home.

Though she hardly remembers what that means.

He's right, the little wolf. He is growing. Or maybe they are shrinking. The boy is a little worried about this latter possibility, and he looks often at his hands, his palms, to try and determine if there's any subtle shrinkage going on. Probably not. He looks at the wolf again; now he is knee-high. Now he is waist-high. Is he still getting bigger? Wolves aren't supposed to be much bigger; the boy is quite sure of that.

"We can be a pack," he says slowly, "but ... I don't think this is our den. No. Our den is back that way. Where we came from. And ... and across. I mean, across. Across the curtain."

He looks to the silver girl for help. She has a name. The idea is a thunderclap in the boy's mind. Names: what a novel concept. Her name is ... is ... it starts with a soft sibilant sound, sh he thinks. The entirety escapes him, but that is okay: she seems to share his mind.

He is a werewolf and they are in the spirit world and a body that stays in this world too long will shrug off its body and stay here forever. Not as a punishment but because everything here is a reflection. Reflections have no use for substance. They're born of and beyond real things.

This he knows. Not his name and not his home and not what brought them here. Only echoes these but he knows now this is not a dream.

At least he thinks he knows.

As the little wolf grows he rocks back on his heels to give it space. The wolf-girl tells him. Found and follow. He stays crouching until the little wolf who is no longer so little who smells like someone he can and cannot remember has come up past his waist and then he stands.

They have to go across the curtain. He knows this would be an easy journey for him. Like stepping through an unlocked gate. This side calls to him more than the realm does but he knows.

He takes a step back but he doesn't leave without them.

Brandon. Possibly Brian. But he is accommodating to Charlotte's nuzzling and nipping and he is playful, wagging happily at the attention. He bumps his head on hers. He wants a pack so badly. He needs a pack he has been so long without a pack, his pack, he could use a pack.

BARK.

His eyes fly wide as Charlotte barks that they found him, and so now he should follow. He looks around, and his crest falls, his tail drooping. "not here?" he whines at her, and at Erich, who is also telling him that not-here is their den, he and his new 'pack'. He goes over to the other one, long-haired male one, and bumps up against him. "tell them here, here is good."

It is unlikely that Hector will tell him any such thing. The wolf droops, saddened.

No, Brian is his name-name, only one of his names. There's another N, another R, a gleaming red glow from the horizon, but it is the wrong direction, it is a name that means the very bright and the very cold.

--

A thunderclap: that is what it is in their minds. His name is Northern Sun. He has a name and it is Northern Sun. His name is also Brian, and he has been lost in the spirit world for almost two years. They came to find him, the four of them, to bring him back to his pack, to help him find his way. Theurges go missing often enough; maybe they each, for one reason or another, felt a measure of pity for his packmates left behind

HIS PACKMATES WHO ARE ALIVE AND WAITING FOR HIM, OH GOD.

They have packmates. They all have packmates behind them, waiting for them. Oh. God. And Northern Sun has been without his for almost two years, they without him, barely feeling him alive, not knowing why he had not returned from beyond the veil.

Because he forgot.

Because he didn't have a talisman.

Or because his was torn from him, too.

--

One of them feels his name returning like a whisper, a breath before a poem: Hhh, hhh.

Another feels it encroaching, coming closer, unwanted, fearful.

Their names are returning to them. The world will return to them. Like all gates, this gate is meant to be opened, meant to be walked through. If you can just remember that it is there. If you can just remember that the barriers between are nothing more than an illusion held in place by spells that you only choose to believe in.

Names are spells. Those spells, if believed in, call them back to their lives. And their truths. And their packmates.

Northern Sun.

That is his name. This tiny-wolf, this small-wolf, this medium-wolf, this full-size-wolf who is now their packmate. Only not. He is not their packmate but he is a packmate, his pack is out there, they are waiting for him,

his name is Northern Sun.

The boy looks thunderstruck. He is wide-eyed and stunned and sucking a breath to give the news, which he thinks is good news, it must be good news, but then: what comes out is --

"Charlotte!"

And he rounds on her, his silver sister. He laughs aloud.

"Charlotte. You're Charlotte!"

He gives her a name. He pins her in place. She is whining. It is an animal whine. It is in the back of her throat, this whine, not precisely of protest but of something else that remains nameless as she is for another three -

- two

- none seconds.

--

And she remembers two. Her name and his name and their names and Northern Sun. Erich says,

You're Charlotte, and the wolf becomes a girl again and she is a different sort of girl now that she is laden with a name. She knows the things behind him; the dark things she can fee scritch-scritch-scratching against the recurve of her mouth.

She swallows them.

She is a girl named Charlotte and she is not laughing but she looks at Erich with a familiar affection,

and names him.

"And you're Erich."

With an odd little smile.

Then looks to Northern Sun. And says,

" - and you're Northern Sun. Come back with us. Your pack is waiting."

Before he remembers his own name he knows he has a pack on the other side unassured of his presence. That he has a mate far from here and they will have a baby any day now and if he never came home his mother is there with her. Not their names but their faces and the tethers they offer him. He knows.

And he knows these two before him. Knows they fight together though they are not pack. Stands while they remember and he waits and then he reaches out to shuck aside the velvet curtain. Maybe they can pass through with him. If not they're strong enough to do it on their own.

He does not will not promise not to leave before Northern Sun does but he stands while the wandering wolf decides whether or not to follow.

No one names Hector, but no one needs to. Hector knows things they are not meant to know. Hector knows his name. He knows the name of his mate and the considered names of his child. He knows he has a child coming. He knows the names of his packmates, current and former. He knows Erich and Charlotte, and knows Keisha. It comes back. It starts to come back.

They came to get Northern Sun because no one should be lost for so long. They came, instead of his pack, because of what this place is: memory-stealer, name-stealer. They would remain here, a whole pack of Garou, and stay with their packmate.

That is why they wanted wolves from disparate packs, with at least one of their number staying behind. It's the only way they could make sure they'd hold it together and get home again.

Home again, home again,

something-ity something.

--

Northern Sun wags slowly. They are not his pack. But his pack -- he remembers. He wuffs at them, and looks at Hector, who is drawing apart the laces of the veil to move through it. They cannot be carried on his strength of spirit. They will have to use their own. They will have to use their own, and hope that the prodigal will go with them.

He sniffs, and chuffs, and his tail does not wag. He shakes his furry head.

"My pack."

The veil is parting. On the other side is Northern Colorado, the outskirts of Fort Collins. It'll be a long run back. But their packmates will be waiting for them.

All of them.