Boomerang

Phenex waited with a nervous impatience for Amon to appear, and when his elder half brother's form finally came into sight a wide grin split the younger's thick muzzle despite - or maybe in anxious reaction to - the neutrality of Amon's own expression. "Amon! I've been tracking you all the way down from the north! I see you've made a pack now and all..."

He trailed off, his grin suddenly disappearing into startled blankness as first a familiar scent, then a familiar form, and lastly a familiar voice assaulted his senses in quick succession. What... no... wait... really? No, impossible. He stood with his heavy limbs stiff and unmoving, thick neck pulling his head back in shock as he stared. "Typhon? But - you're dead. Our father killed you. How... what..."

He wasn't a quick thinker in the best of times, all instinctive and impulsive action and very little forethought, but now he felt like all the gears of his mind had ground to a screeching, smoking halt. He hadn't even begun to process the sudden ghost-like return of his presumed-dead littermate when more voices suddenly battered at him for attention.

It took him a long moment to turn his hefty bulldog-like head from Typhon's form (he had to be really really alive, right? Because Pyralis could see him, and this yearling. Or could everyone see ghosts at the same time? He had never seen a ghost before so he couldn't be sure) to blink thickly at Amon's littermate. He forced an admittedly somewhat sickly grin back onto his muzzle. "I've been good, been great. Been training, getting stronger, hunting. How about you?" He was babbling nervously, he knew, talking way too fast but he couldn't seem to slow the flow of words.

He didn't recognize the youth but his very markings and coloration made his lineage obvious as the child of one of the Abraxas. Was this one of Pyralis' pups? She'd whelped just before he'd gone wandering. Though hadn't Amon been having a second litter around that time too? Unthinkingly he began to scratch at the front of one foreleg with his other forepaw, a subconscious precursor to what would undoubtedly become a nervous gnawing fit when he was alone. Taking a wild stab in the dark he exclaimed heartily at the youth, "You must be one of Pyralis' kids! Ashiel, was it?" There were, after all, only two out of that litter and the yearling definitely wasn't the female so that just left one name to pick from. "I'm Phenex, and thi - this... is..." he stopped mid-gesture at Typhon, twitching reflexively away from the automatic introduction he'd been about to give what was surely a ghostly apparition, or another hallucination.