Ornature

They began building the second house in the first week of June.

Melantha bought a trailer bed to tow at the back of the Jeep. She and Erich started going to Home Depot a lot. Granted, they also started running off into the woods more, by themselves and all. It's summer. They do what animals do when it's warm and verdant outside.

The frame is up, the house is being built, the second tinyhouse that is just for Melantha, that will sometimes fold down a railing and share a porch with the other tinyhouse but will be her territory, her own. She and Erich work hard on it. They work a lot, early in the morning or into the night when the heat isn't quite as oppressive. At least in the mountains it's a little easier to cope with; it's cooler.

Right now, Melantha is not working on the house or working at the saloon. She's down by a creek, washing out some clothes with this nifty bio-degradable soap she gets from REI. Her thick hair is tied up in a kerchief like some 1940s factory girl. Her sweats are elastic at the calves, and though there are sneakers on the shore, her feet are currently bare. She's standing in the water in a THROWED ROLLS t-shirt she definitely borrowed from Charlotte or Erich because Melantha does this all the time, stealing hoodies or boxer shorts or whatever else, as though everything is communal, which

in some ways, it is.

She is humming to herself as she washes.

Charlotte comes and goes. She does what other sorts of animals do, in the summer, when it is verdant and green. Which is to say: she ranges, higher and higher and farther and farther, seeking whatever strange things, small or great, that she seeks. Following the memory of a cloud or the promise of a rill or the flight of a something over a ridge. Honoring a promise or folding it into a quiet, riddling sort of bribe or meditating at the edge of a high clear lake that has not seen the reflection of a human face in half-a-year.

Charlotte also helps with the construction: when she can, as she will. She hasn't got Erich's brute strength or Melantha's determination but she helped construct the first tinyhouse and she has small, clever hands, and she can use any of the manual tools they employ, thhough she is still suspicious of the power tools they might rent they way some cats are suspicious of their reflections and,

it is summer. It is a certain day and a certain hour and a certain slant of light and Melantha is washing clothes in the creek when there is a noise in the woods and the noise is deliberate in its way but also minute, you see: animal.

And the underbrush at the creek's edge is thickthickthick, all that water, all that abundent growth, but the animal threads through all of that growth, prowls down the embankment, as silver-white as moonlight on virgin, just-fallen snow.

The spell of its majesty is broken only by the sweep of its tail: low. Wagging.

Melantha grew up first among boys. Her father, and four brothers. Then two brothers, when a pair of them ran away because Black Fury-born sons could never be Black Furies. But then came Damaris. Then came the nights when it stopped being her father who came to her in the middle of the night to comfort her while she cried over her lost mother and lost brothers and started being Damaris. Then came the sort-of sister she sort-of grew up with. Then came the fires, and the betrayal, and the horrors. Then came Oregon, and the caernless sept in the wilderness. Swimming in bathing in that endlessly deep reservoir, learning not to be afraid of such abyssal darkness. Then came all the sisters, lithe dark things with broad shoulders and heavy brows and steely eyes and soft fur, warm palms. Then came the teachings of ancient things, of goddesses before gods were ever considered, of the fear and awe that humankind once had for birth, and all the glory and terror that brought with it. Then came the Black Furies, and her life among them, for a very long time.

She grew up, in truth, among wolves. When they leave for days, even weeks, she fears and she worries and she reaches out in her mind to her sweetest sister of all, a caress without words, asking for an answer: are you there?

are you well?

will you come back?

And yes, and yes, and yes.

She still fears and worries and reaches out, but she doesn't panic. She goes on building her new tinyhouse. She smiles when Charlotte shows up and helps with this or that. They talk little. Melantha talks a lot. She has an active, engaging mind, eager and full-throttle, but when she is with Charlotte, she tends to talk less. More comes through body language. Granted: plenty comes via body language with Erich, too, but they argue a lot. They talk about everything. He gets so many things wrong. Melantha suspects him of things he would never dream of because she is not used to being able to trust a man, any man, when so many men got so very close and made such a mess of her and she tolerated it because, well

the same reason Erich and Charlotte tolerate it when they get hurt, don't they? It's war. It's not meant to be gentle.

She has been doing so well, though. For all her summery absences Charlotte can tell that: Melantha is getting stronger of heart and mind and soul. Her spirit is coming back, the brightness and resilience that was there when Charlotte first laid eyes on her. She is building a house with her own two hands and the hands of her two best friends. She lives in the wild, washing in the river and eating on the grass. She is within herself again. She is healing.

Melantha is humming a song from Mary Poppins. About birds. And she is glancing up, hearing a noise, and watching the pale white silver thing that comes from the shadows. She smiles, knowing the form and the eyes. She thinks that if she could change, she'd be black the way that Erich is gray and Charlotte is white. They'd be such a team. They are such a team. She keeps washing, and humming, and when the wolf comes near the bank,

she cups her hand and sends a wave of water flying towards her bestie.

There is a certain way that puppies wrestle with water, see - which is not a thing with which you can wrestle, right? which is liquid and which is ever-yielding and which is movement and formless and yet: puppies, so splashed, but at the wave that engulfs them, lower they heads and raise their butts and slash, this way, that way, nipping in every direction, barking at the waves, chasing the tide,

and this is a creek, isn't it, not an ocean, not even a river. There's a current, hard to see except where it runs all bright rills over smooth-stones, but it has no pull, it has no hidden undertow, no tidal movement, and that wolf is an adult, a young adult but an adult. Charlotte is twenty. She is no longer a puppy and yet, that spectacular, lovely creature, bearing the purity and madness of a ridiculous number of inbred generations, is splashed,

and pounces,

and nips at the wave, splashing against the rocks, leaning into it, hurtling through it, glorious, glorious, until she crests it and rises through it, all dripping wet, and lolls her mouth open, see -

almost like a grin,

before she starts to shake herself dry, sending droplets raining EVERYwhere.

--

(Of course she sees, of course she knows, of course she feels, that beneath her skin and behind her eyes, Melantha is healing. Is finding her balance and her place, is filling in the places left hollow, is sleeker, is more sure, is more solid and gleaming in her way, than she was this summer-last, when they came without stopping from Baja to Denver, dragging their house behind them, to find her again. Healthier, more solid, more immediate, more real than she was, too, before all that, when she wore a strange, false face painted over her own face,

for the hunt.

Charlotte's stronger too, isn't she? And yet, still somehow - always? broken. So easily broken, shattered. Some things were never made to heal, or never meant to. Madness is the curse of her tribe.)

Charlotte looks too graceful and too majestic by half. Melantha splashes her and grins as her friend nips and jumps at the water like it's something she can wrestle down and pin and win, YAY. She bounds into the creek and Melantha is grinning. It rained earlier, the air is cooler than it used to be, the creek full of water. She doesn't mind the shaken-off water hitting her face and everywhere else, since she's already standing in a creek.

She just waits for Charlotte to stop, then leans down, pressing a little kiss between Charlotte's eyes, on her narrow brow. "Hello, bestie."

This is what Charlotte is, after all.

The wolf threads herself heavily against Melantha's thighs, the push of her head a physical caress, a scent-mingling, a ritual greeting, a marking-of-pack and a mark-of-pack. Human words seem so strange to the wolf-mind, the practice of kissing too, right? But Charlotte is not merely Charlotte-wolf, she is Charlotte-the-girl wrapped up in Charlotte-wolf, all alien and familiar and her tail thumps affectionately against Melantha's thighs as Melantha greets her, this heavy, brushing beat, and then there is no more beat because she is stepping away, because she is changing, because she is sloughing one skin for another and another and another until she is a girl-again, a young woman, lithe and remarkably spare and lovely in a strange and fae and hollow-boned sort of way, and taller than Melantha now, by an inch - no, by two inches.

"Hi." Says Charlotte, and then looks around, and blinks at the wash Melantha is doing, and says, "I can help with the laundry." Because she can: this girl who had never cooked for herself and had no idea how to run a washing machine before Erich showed her, because everything, everything necessary, was done for her, before she can here.

Then she blinks at the shirt - Melantha can see her reading it - and her smile sort of sharpens and deepens. "They really throw the rolls there, you know? You hafta catch them if you wanna eat them.

"Erich caught his and gave them all to me."

Of course he did.

Now Melantha is all wet. Her sweatpants are wet and her end of her shirt is wet and her arms and legs are wet. She doesn't mind much; she was sweaty anyway. She scritches Charlotte a bit, behind the ears and along the scalp, her hand all wet, but it was wet anyway. It smells faintly of honeysuckle and soap, but soap made of things like beeswax. It's not bad.

Charlote moves, and Charlotte changes, and Melantha leans over to pick up the shirt she draped over a rock to rinse it again, squeezing and rinsing it out. She likes summer; you can dry your clothes on lines strung between the eaves of the tinyhouse and the branches of trees.

"You don't have to," she mentions. "I'm almost done," which she is, tossing the wrung-out shirt into a basket of clean, wet, rinsed clothes to be hung. "But you can help me carry them back and hang them, if you want. They're heavier, on the way back,"

because of water. Duh.

She smiles, tromping over to the basket of 'dirty' for the last thing, a pair of boxers that Erich hasn't even worn for like three weeks because Melantha stole them because they were baggy and soft and comfortable. She doesn't do Erich's laundry. Erich does Erich's laundry, and usually just does it at Cold Crescent, which is why he totally smells bad most of the time. Some of the time.

Melantha doesn't mind his smell, most of the time.

"Didn't you catch any yourself?" she asks, instead of that was sweet or of course, since he can't eat the damn things or he was just showing off or... anything else.

"'Course," says Charlotte, and she says 'course to two or three things: of course she will help carry the laundry and hang it on the line like prayerflags that fly in the himalayas, where Melantha's clothing will get infused with some faint edge of the spirit of whatever wind is moving that day; or perhaps the husk of sunlight falling through a spare, warm, dusty day, or maybe the fickle play of moonlight through the pattern of the oak leaves, or -

Also: of course she caught some rolls. Charlotte is not strong and she is not hearty and she was not made for war, except in the manner that they are all made for war, because war is necessary, because war binds their nerves and claims their eyes and burns all bright in their hearts: but she is swift, see, and graceful, and light-footed, and she has very clever hands.

"I caught more than Erich, and I ate some and saved the rest for the sparrows outside. They can go anywhere, you know. Sparrow. Just like us.

And she inhales - hmm, delicious, the scent of beeswax and honeysuckle, which also makes her think of beeds, which makes her remember -

"I found a beehive in the woods. If we figured it out we could get some honey from it. I don't know how to do that though, without hurting the bees. I guess we could ask nicely."

Erich asked her what color sheets she wanted to get for the bed that will be built into her new home. Melantha, sharp as she is, was intuiting much more: he wanted to try and visualize what it would be like, could he tolerate it, would it hurt, what would it look like, what would it feel like, where would she be sleeping if not in the alcove across from his loft. If he could picture her sleeping soundly among her sheets, maybe he would feel less anxious about the whole thing. And Melantha knew it didn't matter what color her sheets were, to him. She said the honest truth: white. To wash, to bleach in the sun, to go with whatever, to feel clean and cool in summer and soft and familiar in winter.

Melantha doesn't have sheets yet. She doesn't have a mattress yet. The bed isn't done.

But she'll snap those sheets out after washing them in the snow-fed creek here, dry them in the sunlight or -- in colder weather -- take them to Cold Crescent. She can do that. She has a Jeep. She can go wherever she wants, whenever she wants, by herself or with Erich or Charlotte riding shotgun. And she's building a house she can tow.

She could run off into the sunset and never look back, if she wanted.

She would have to want that.

--

Melantha smiles. She's crouching, washing the last pair of boxers, scrubbing them with some soap in the creek, which dissipates the suds so rapidly it's as though they never were. She does it twice. She does it as efficiently and quickly as she skins rabbits, which she does with startling speed sometimes.

"You could," she says, thoughtfully, of bees. She looks up at Charlotte, as she's scrubbing the second time. "Erich and I were talking the other day, about some stuff. I decided I want to drive out to Oregon when my house is done, and visit the sisters." Glancing down, she licks her lips, thinking. "I... started to think about some things, and... how I felt, and whether or not they really abandoned me when they sent me out into the world."

Quietly, then, shaking the boxers into the water. "I sort of think maybe they didn't. That... maybe they thought they were giving me a gift. Letting me go. I don't think they really knew what all I wanted from them."

To be one of them. To be with them. To be beloved, and to belong.

Melatha exhales slowly. "So I want to go back, and see them. And talk. I told Erich I want to go by myself, but... maybe you two could follow, a few days behind." She looks up at Charlotte again, rinsing and rinsing, making sure all the soap gets out of the fabric. "We could go to Baja from Oregon. A caravan."

Charlotte doesn't know what the sisters did or why the sisters did it. The only sisters she has ever had - other than Melantha - were the little girls raised by a too-strict mother who hated the modern world and all its technology to the point of phobia, in their starched crinolines and impossibly fine little clothes. Sometimes one inherits the right sort of madness for one's world - a tendency towards exacting precision, a fastidious nature that approaches the otherworldly. Sometimes one does not.

But, Charlotte, she sort-of thinks that Melantha is right and she also sort-of knew that Melantha would want to go alone and some part of her is at once ready to let go for as long as necessary and sort-of frightened that Melantha will simply: go away.

As people do, for the reasons they do.

And some part of Charlotte is even at peace with that idea,

but this is not the human-part. Not the girl-part. It is the part that waxes and wanes with the moon.

"Okay." Charlotte says, quietly, as she does, not precisely diffidently, but close to it. "When do you want to go?"

Melantha watches.

Erich is not the only one who loves her.

Or the only one who might fear losing her.

Melantha aches.

--

"When the house is done," she says simply, shaking out the boxers, wringing them out tightly, squeezing water back into the creek from the fabric. Shaking them out again. Rinsing them out again, again, because you have to be sure there's no more soap left. Triple sure.

She watches Charlotte. "You got quiet."

"I want to say, What if you go back and you want to stay?"

There's just one more piece of clothing. Charlotte doesn't help with that last bit. It's a one-person job, so she stands back, up to her ankles in the water, up to her mid-calf, the jeans dedicated to her spirit and soul darker for the water.

She's not precisely looking at Melantha because it is hard, it is so very hard, for Charlotte to talk about her feelings and her fears. Thinking about them makes them real, makes them powerful, makes them difficult, makes them loud. When she thinks them - when she feels them - there are times when she knows that they will never ever stop. Just get louder and louder and louder until everything else she might hear gets all drowned out.

But: see, this diffident little shrug, after, mildly dismissive.

"I want to ask that, but I don't think I should. It's not a fair thing to ask. Because if you want to stay, and they want you to stay, then you probably should. Or at least, you shouldn't not stay just because it might make me sad.

"So that's why I'm quiet. Because I shouldn't ask that. It's not fair. Just 'cos you're far away doesn't mean you stop loving someone. Just 'cos they're dead doesn't mean you stop. They're still inside you."

Melantha watches her, holding the boxers lest they be tugged away by the soft current. They'd be easy to catch, but still: wasted energy.

What if she goes back and wants to stay.

Her brow furrows. She aches, oh, she aches. That Charlotte wonders that at all, and that Charlotte is so scared to even vocalize it because it will be too big and too overwhelming for her.

"I think there will be a part of me that wants to stay there," she says quietly, because she's thought of that. But she rinses, and she wrings, and she talks. She sighs. "Except that... I left. They gave me my old identity back and sent me off and I didn't beg to stay then. I was so hurt, and angry, and confused, and I missed you and Erich so much. Then when I was with you, I missed the sisters so much, and I was still so hurt and angry. It was really, really confusing.

"The more I think about it now, the stranger it seems that I even grew up that way. That it was my life. That I did everything I did." She frowns, and is quiet a moment, then shakes her head. "I know it's cliche, but I'm a different person than I was a year ago. "

Melantha looks up. "Beyond that... I love you more than so many of the sisters I was ever with, Charlotte. You're not a sister. You're my sister. That's different." She hesitates. "And... I'm in love with Erich. They might -- might -- let you stay with me, if I went back. But never Erich. He'd never be allowed into the sept. Then I'd be with them, and I'd just rever to who I was a year or two ago, and be separated from you, and apart from Erich, and... I don't want that. Even if a part of me feels, and aches, and whatever. I know it's not really where I belong anymore. At least not right now."

"You're - " a deep breath; the sharpest sort of pause, which feels arrested, see. Charlotte has made her way over to the bank and found a rock on which to perch and she's watching Melantha now with her distinctively pale eyes and - " you're in love with Erich?"

[perception + primal urge + volcano, functioning similar to empathy]

Dice: 7 d10 TN6 (3, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10) ( success x 3 )

Empathy reading: There is a remarkable complexity to Charlotte's feelings on the matter, layers wrapped up in her body and mind that even she is not entirely accessing. Prime among them is a genuine happiness for.. Erich as much as Melantha. Charlotte knows that Erich has been in love with Melantha for a very long time. She made the pigeon beads, after all, so that they could stay together. That happiness has a bitter-sweetness that could be misread as loneliness - and there is a degree of that wrapped up in there, but it is more complex and pedigreed than you could expect. There is also a strange, scissoring tinge of jealousy that she does not understand and cannot admin. Hasn't Charlotte been half-in-love with Melantha for a very, very long time.

From all of that, Charlotte does not pick out that some part of Melantha may very well want to stay with the Black Furies, turn away from whatever life she's built outside of that sept and just go back to what is familiar. She doesn't hold onto that part.

She also doesn't try to analyze Melantha's confusion, or explain it. See: Erich sometimes does. He doesn't think he's very smart, but he likes figuring this stuff out, and explaining it, and he likes it because sometimes it lets him help more, but he'd hear about her confusion and her sundering longing, and he'd probably talk about that, or at very least: tell her it's okay to be confused, and want two different things. Charlotte doesn't do that. For Charlotte, confusion can just be confusion.

Charlotte does not glow with pleasure to hear that Melantha loves her more. She does not blush with tenderness at the call of sisterhood, or ache with reciprocal love to hear that Melantha doesn't want to be separated from her.

She hears:

I'm in love with Erich

and repeats back:

you're in love with Erich?

but some of her breath is held, like if she lets it out it will take a secret along for the ride.

Charlotte, perhaps too concentrated on her breath to secure the other outlets, tells secrets with her eyes instead. They all have such pale eyes, this ragtag band of wild children. Pale, bright, secret-keeping and secret-telling and vividly intelligent and starvingly rageful eyes. And Charlotte's are conflicted, more often than not, because Charlotte's madness walks in stride with her purity: beautiful and intense and terrible and sometimes, a little overpowering.

Melantha-in-the-water looks at Charlotte for a while after she asks that question, requests that repetition or clarification or confirmation. She looks at her, sensing her joy, her compassionate pleasure. Sensing the sense of an outsider, though maybe not just an outsider to Erich-and-Melantha, because she isn't not at all not even a little bit, but a bit of an outsider to the world. Maybe.

She is quiet for a few seconds then. She finishes whatever bit of laundry she's doing, then wades through the creek to her friend, lifting cold, wet hands to either side of Charlotte's cheeks. Melantha looks in her eyes for a heartbeat, then for three more.

She kisses Charlotte's brow, right above her third eye. And she kisses each of Charlotte's cheeks if she's allowed, high on the arch of those art nouveau cheekbones. One, two. She draws back then, finding Charlotte's eyes again, droplets of creek-water finding Charlotte's neck as they roll from Melantha's fingers.

"I love you, too," she says quietly.

I love you also.

I love you back.

Charlotte is so, so still when Melantha comes close to her. Closer. She does not feel like a wolf but a deer in the dappled shadows beneath the denser canopy that frames the life-giving waters of the stream in which Melantha does her laundry, except of course that delicate alertness one associates with prey is always an illusion with Charlotte, entirely human in its signification: the slender jaw, the two-wide eyes, the elegant arc of startlement in her brows that asks without asking -

who

- when the answer is -

me.

So, still, chin lifted, mouth slightly parted as Melantha comes close, her alertness fine and strange and alien and pure enough that she hardly belongs in the fallen world she inhabits, does she? Except that's all a fucking lie: we all belong here. Everything is soiled, was made to be soiled.

Melantha's fingers are cool on Charlotte's temples, on her skin, the hushed and faintly mineral scent of the mountain stream. The tannins of the pine needles through which the water has run. Charlotte's family is so far out of human understanding that she is not familiar with the rituals of baptism - the Judeo-Christian rituals - but she understands water, doesn't she - and the water feels like a rite, some sacred ritual that she cannot quite name.

--

Charlotte gives Melantha a short, tight little nod by way of response. I know, even if she cannot verbalize it, and her eyes are shining, and she is taken by a wild little urge that she swallows down even before it emerges, some mad, self-protective little reflex that has her smiling tight around the edges of her own mouth and nodding again, see?

she knows.

she knows.

Some things cannot be spoken and some things cannot be dreamed and for Charlotte, so many things cannot be spoken and cannot be dreamed and like a puppy she bumps her brow against Melantha's then, somewhere mid-nod and pulls herself upright and pulls herself back and pulls herself scrabbling up the muddy bank and takes her share of the laundry, more than her share if she can, if Melantha - who smells like wild places and dark secret things and spring water against cool, hidden stones and the first turning of the earth warming beneath the sun after a long, dark winter - will allow her to take more than her share.

Later, see? On the walk back, or even at the tinyhouse, hanging the laundry out on the lines stretched from the frame of one tinyhouse to another. Charlotte will say, "I think you can go and run with them, even, want to be there and still come back to us. I don't think you just have to have one place. The moon doesn't. She goes away and comes back.

"I could make you something so you'd remember.

"Maybe not a pigeon. Maybe something out of earth. Igneous rock."

Charlotte gave Melantha water. First thing, when she could not open that disgusting senator's chest and make art from his rib-bones, when she could not get Melantha to say that she would never, ever let him touch her again. She did not judge, at least not out loud, but she gave Melantha pure, pure water, so that Melantha could get clean again. Charlotte understands baptism, even if she doesn't understand baptism. Charlotte baptized Melantha, even if she wasn't there when Melantha stood under moonlight and poured the water over her brow, onto her face and into her hair, even drinking the last few drops. Charlotte was not there but Charlotte was there, and Melantha was clean, and things happened out in those woods that night, the next morning, that mattered then and still matter now, which might not have happened if Charlotte had not given Melantha water.

Melantha, in response, doesn't know what she gives Charlotte. What she can give Charlotte, except loving her and trusting her and sharing secrets with her. Melantha doesn't even know that it was a year or more or something before Charlotte could ever talk to Erich about what she went through, even though she told Melantha so early on that Melantha was still living at the Hay-Adams. They tell each other secrets and they trust each other with truths and Melantha believes in Charlotte's ability to intuitively understand and accept her just like she believes in Erich's ability to argue and meet her, match her even at her most vicious pace. It was Charlotte who explained things to her with a bowl and some water, and Charlotte who understands Melantha's shrine of black fur and metal and fire and tiny, small things she finds that make her feel anchored or make her feel happy or make her feel simply more like herself.

Her hands stay on Charlotte for a moment, even through that suppressed urge that Melantha has the mercy not to pull from its hiding place, but then

Charlotte slips through her hands like so many droplets, away, away, because

she can't.

Whatever it is, she can't, and that is why Melantha has never asked.

--

They pick up the basket of wet clothes and carry it between them, sharing a load that was only for one person when it was dry. They carry it into the sun and open air and the lines that Melantha already strung up, pull clothespins from a mesh bag of them, continue the work. Melantha is very quiet, and Charlotte is quiet, and the water dries on their skin til it may as well have never been there.

But it was.

When Charlotte speaks, Melantha has grown so used to the silence that she almost startles. She looks over, sudden, and what Charlotte says makes her entire heart fold in on itself, aching.

"Charlotte," she says, leaving a shirt hanging by one sleeve, letting it dangle. "Charlotte, I don't need anything to remember you. I would never forget you." She leaves it dangling, moving to Charlotte right then and wrapping both her arms around the other woman, pulling her close.

The moon goes away and comes back.

Melantha has tears in her eyes, and tears against Charlotte's shoulder. Very, very quiet ones. They don't shudder as they drip, and there are only two of them after all, but they are there. She squeezes Charlotte, fiercely.

Charlotte can't.

She can't.

She doesn't know what or why and she doesn't think about it because if she throught about it there would be things inside of her head that go frighteningly wrong and terrible and she doesn't - she doesn't - she can't -

--

Melantha loves her. She has the mercy not to seek, and sometimes not to see, and never to ask.

Charlotte, for her part, does not know the gift she has been given, the gentleness with which she has been blessed.

--

There is something reflexive about a squeeze that tight. Charlotte returns it without reflection and without consideration, holds on to Melantha just as tightly as Melantha holds onto her.

Moreso.

Skinny arms wrapped around Melantha's shoulders, face presses firmly into the jointure of Melantha's neck and shoulder. The dark tangle of Melantha's gleaming hair all around, so full of her scent that Charlotte swells with adoration, love, and a fierce, fierce protectiveness.

"I know."

Charlotte says, and this is firm, this is solid, this is unthinking.

"I meant, something that would spark in the darkness. Something to light your way home."

Let's stop dancing for a moment. Let's pretend the music stopped.

Let's admit that Charlotte has been half-in-love with Melantha for a long, long time. Let's admit that Melantha has loved her back. And let's own up to the fact that at the brook, when Melantha said that she's in love with Erich, it hurt Charlotte's feelings. Let's face the fact of how much it hurts to love, and be unable to love, to want to touch and be unable to touch, to be watching your own feelings and your own longings exist separately from you, as though they're through some kind of cloudy, impermeable membrane, and to know that if only you weren't so fucking crazy you could pass through. You could love, and touch, and you could say stuff and ask for stuff and it wouldn't make you snap in half.

Let us confess, in all purity, that maybe what Charlotte wanted to do and very much did not want to do at all and was very afraid of and very much hoping for were all the same thing: to kiss Melantha not on her eyes or brow or cheeks or shoulder but just kiss her.

--

They are Volcano's children. They aren't supposed to attack without giving warning. It doesn't mean that they can't be ambushed. It doesn't mean they can't get blindsided. They're honesty itself, a pack of equal voices because the earth's voice is one voice all fire and stone and movement, and it costs them something to hold all these things back. To keep them under the surface, under the water, to keep them cooled off and slowed down, so they don't wreak a cataclysm.

But let's admit these truths to ourselves, because we know, and they know, that nothing stays silent -- nothing stays dormant -- forever. Unless it dies.

--

Skinny arms hold tight. Melantha's not skinny. She's slender, but she's athletic. There's muscles in her arms, there's all the solidity of earth there. As always, she is sniffed a little, inhaled quietly. This she is used to, and does not mind. She succumbs to it, comforted by the familiarity.

Charlotte tells her what she means. Melantha smiles into Charlotte's shoulder. "You don't have to make me anything," she says, lifting her head but staying close, looking into Charlotte's eyes because they are rather close to the same height. She smiles, even though it aches. "I'd be able to find you guys."

The air smells light sunlight and fresh turned earth and the light is changing now and the sun is moving across the sky, as it does, shifting the shadows in which they are cast, lengthening them. The year is already starting to fail, isn't it? Each day shorter than the one that preceded it but it is still summer and summer will simmer across the peaks and the slopes and the high planes for a long, long time,

until the earth turns again, and goes to sleep.

There's some resistance in Charlotte, when Melantha pulls back to find and meet her eyes, because Charlotte - animal thing - wants to bury herself in Melantha's scent, fold herself into the sunlit warmth of Melantha's hair. It feels to her both wholly indulgent and somehow safe and it doesn't make her head hurt and since Melantha stopped wearing another face over her face there is so much honesty sometimes, so much clarity in Melantha's gaze that Charlotte is -

Charlotte is -

Charlotte does not think about such things.

Their eyes meet, pale and clear and Charlotte can taste the ache in the edges of Melantha's sundering smile and it brings tears to her eyes and she does not know and does not ask why.

Just swallows back the swollen little lump in her throat, swallows hard against it and holds the look and says,

"Promise?"

And she asks not because she doubts, you see, but because this has somehow become to her a ritual exchange, a compact, a ritual, a rite. She believes. She believes, there's no doubt in her eyes, just an aching sort of implicit trust.

This past winter they sheltered all together in the tinyhouse that Erich and Charlotte built. Little fireplace, little house, a bedroom and two lofts. When winter comes this time, Melantha will be on the other side of two walls. She will not have a fireplace, and yes Erich was aghast, though. There's a reason. A good reason. She wants an excuse. Always, but especially in winter, she wants to make sure she has a really good excuse to come back. And sharing a fire with her packmates is a very good reason. Especially in winter.

This may be the first time she sees tears in Charlotte's eyes, may be the first time ever. Melantha doesn't know what to do, only she does, because tears don't frighten her, tears don't hurt her. She wraps Charlotte up again and holds her, doesn't try to say anything about it at all.

"Yes, promise," she says quietly.

Charlotte is wrapped up and buries herself once again in Melantha's hair. Her pale eyes screw shut and her nose is pressed against Melantha's neck, just at the hairline, and her mouth is against Melantha's pulse, soft enough and present enough that she can feel the doubled beat of Melantha's heart through her skin.

It is not a kiss, but there is a whisper of movement as Charlotte lifts her chin and resettles herself in Melantha's embrace, her own body humming with a ferociousness that borders on certainty,

that they will all be together until they die.

That, somehow, this is where she was always meant to be.

"I'll still make you something." Charlotte, quiet. "Because I want to."

So of course Charlotte just dives back in. Melantha has so much hair, and she doesn't always shower every day and it's summer so she sweats when she's outside in the sun or working or walking. She smells like creek water, which isn't super-pleasant but at least it's earthy. And she smells like heat and sunlight right now, and sweat, and all of that is living in her hair, pulled down from the kerchief it was in at the water.

She laughs a little into Charlotte's hair, because she's very sad and hurting and she's also inexplicably happy and comforted. She doesn't know what truths are living in Charlotte's heart or whispering in her mind, but they are truths; Theurges know things. She knows that. Erich knows that. Theurges just know, sometimes, and you have to close your eyes and trust it and respect it even though it can be scary, just like you close your eyes and trust Erich's strength or Melantha's honesty.

They will be together until they die. All of them, together. Strong and wise and true.

--

"I know you will," Melantha says, which perhaps isn't the most gracious thing she could say right now, but is the truth. She smiles, hugging Charlotte,

for a very long time, in fact.

They cannot stand there forever. That may be the way movies end and every story that ever came with a lesson attached to it by way of finale, but that is not the way Real Things work, and for all that they are monstrous and mythic and strange and golden and warm and terrifying and broken and fiction and non-fiction all at once, they are assuredly: Real Things.

Someone breaks that hug apart. Maybe it gets to the point where it is strange and awkward and Charlotte does not precisely understand the awkwardness because she is more animal than she is girl and belongs more to the moon than the earth, but even she can sense it sometimes, now. Someone loosens her arms, someone turns her head. Someone inhales a breath that is not comforted and beloved but is on its on, very much what next?

There's still laundry to be hung up. They don't really talk while they hang it, the click of the clothes pins all wood on wood, the tension of the line and the slack of it. The weight of the wet clothes.

They twist more water out of the heaviest pieces and maybe - maybe - there is a bit of a water war that starts the way a dog's shake does - all accidental - and then gets married with laughter and turns deliberate.

While the laundry dries, they go hunting.

Together, of course.

Today, tonight, Charlotte can hardly bear to be apart.

[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.