yo, chill out will you?

Something in his introduction had sparked something in the large wolf's otherwise unexpressive features, but Iho wasn't aware of what it was until the man introduced himself in turn. Hattori. Shogun. Spoken in the tongue he hadn't used in almost a year. The shock on the young wolf's face was less concealed, a widening of surprised eyes, the upward turn of the edges of his lips. Well now, this was a pleasant surprise! The wolf spoke with the dialect from the southern parts of his home—although to be fair, when your pack lives on the northern tip of an island, everything is south to you. Perhaps he had more in common with this impressive wolf than he thought.

"It's an honor, Shogun," he responded in their mother tongue, dipping his head noticeably lower. Hattori was his elder and his superior, and despite the boy's roguish personality, the respect of those above him had been a lesson deeply instilled into him by his parents. Lords, if only they could see him now, in the presence of a wolf such as Hattori! "Ashen... That is the empire on the northern continent, correct? What brings you so far from home?"

The question could have been construed two ways: what brought him so far from their homeland, and what brought him to the south from Boreas? He was intimately familiar with Ashen, having lingered just outside the pack's borders for the last several months while he recovered. That was the pack Kitsune belonged to. The impressive shogun, he must have been someone of great importance to the pack to the north.

"Kumiho"