not all scars are visible
05-07-2021, 07:20 PM
It was dark, the night her father had buried the corpses he claimed was her mother and Azure. Ari had no interest in sleeping, and even less interest in sleeping surrounded by her family. She didn't know her father hadn't gone to the family's den to sleep, because she never returned there herself. Oh, she had no intention of running away, any more than she had ever had when she'd snuck out. She just needed to not be around them and to not be where they could find her. Instead she'd taken off from pack lands, using every trick she'd ever learned from long seasons of sneaking away and avoiding the rest of her family's companions. Coating herself in mud, laying false trails, running along the bed of a river wide deep and wide enough to make her scent difficult to find along it... and making her escape into the soulless forest, where the perpetual mists would mute scent and the swampy, fungus-y, mossy scent of the forest itself was cloying to the nose.
In fact, it so deadened the nose that she'd very nearly walked up on Asla and had had to backpedal furiously to avoid crossing paths with her older sister and the giant purple brother she really only knew from the meeting and had no reason to think she could trust anymore than she could trust Asla - which was to say, about as far as she could throw a horse. Why were they even here? Why couldn't they have picked literally anywhere else to meet up and yell at each other? She couldn't even imagine what was making them shout and make such hideous noises, but her mother surely would have made them both take a bath, they reeked so much of such a weird musky smell.
Of course that thought, the thought of her mother, had set off the pain that had been momentarily shocked from her by the sudden danger, cutting into her like a knife and she'd fled, heedless of whether her siblings heard her, but after a moment she made herself begin once again to hide her trail. Tears burned her eyes and clogged her throat when she finally stopped and jammed herself into a hollow beneath a fallen tree, curled into a miserable, wet ball of black and purple fur. Tansy leaped up into the dead branches of the tree to hide herself, clearly troubled, but not knowing how to help. Even the normally loud and brash jay was quiet, fluffing himself up against the mists in his perch nearby. Despite the tears that threatened, she couldn't bring herself to actually cry, just curled up around the pain in her chest and keened silently at the innocence she'd lost that day when her father had said Zee's name.
In fact, it so deadened the nose that she'd very nearly walked up on Asla and had had to backpedal furiously to avoid crossing paths with her older sister and the giant purple brother she really only knew from the meeting and had no reason to think she could trust anymore than she could trust Asla - which was to say, about as far as she could throw a horse. Why were they even here? Why couldn't they have picked literally anywhere else to meet up and yell at each other? She couldn't even imagine what was making them shout and make such hideous noises, but her mother surely would have made them both take a bath, they reeked so much of such a weird musky smell.
Of course that thought, the thought of her mother, had set off the pain that had been momentarily shocked from her by the sudden danger, cutting into her like a knife and she'd fled, heedless of whether her siblings heard her, but after a moment she made herself begin once again to hide her trail. Tears burned her eyes and clogged her throat when she finally stopped and jammed herself into a hollow beneath a fallen tree, curled into a miserable, wet ball of black and purple fur. Tansy leaped up into the dead branches of the tree to hide herself, clearly troubled, but not knowing how to help. Even the normally loud and brash jay was quiet, fluffing himself up against the mists in his perch nearby. Despite the tears that threatened, she couldn't bring herself to actually cry, just curled up around the pain in her chest and keened silently at the innocence she'd lost that day when her father had said Zee's name.