You are someone else

The carnival was a welcome relief from the monotony of life within Habari. New sounds, smells, and wolves all around gathered to play games, sing songs, participate in contests and all around enjoy the gift of life and love. The last festival Aryn had attended she'd found herself overwhelmed by the crowds and the music and the loud voices that came with the reality of a wide-scale gathering, but today was different. She felt able to blend in for the first time in seasons, to fly beneath the radar ever since she'd ran away from her pack and been punished for the transgression.

The soft hearted girl had even found herself having fun, throwing darts and rings and fishing in the duck pond while the coywolves enthusiastically encouraged her on. Somehow she'd managed to pierce a balloon, winning for herself something called a 'scar remover' that Recluse had promptly stepped up to swipe out from between her paws. It was a solution she'd earned too easily to be upset to lose, but in it's absence Aryn could swear she felt the healed scar upon her chest throb heavily once more.

She stepped away from her Alpha to find privacy away from the crowds, her horned head slinking low between her shoulders as the shadow of a watchful bird cast across her small form. The companion had not yet sounded any alarm, but Aryn knew should she try to take the opportunity to run again that the potoo would intervene.

His familiar face was somehow both exciting and devastating, causing Aryn to pause and shuffle nervously in her approach. Eligos hadn't seen her, she could just as easily turn and leave, but there was a pain upon the stoic man's face that she could not ignore. His sudden growl brought her fur to stand on end, the sound stirring something between fear and desire in her chest as she remembered the first time she'd heard it - laying protected beneath him. She lifted her maimed paw and adjusted the leather upon her chest, ensuring it was doing it's job in hiding the ugliness of her scars. So much had changed since she saw him last in those woods, not just for Aryn but for wolves all across Boreas.

"If you hate crowds so much, why do you come at all?" She spoke aloud, struggling to dial her tone away from her nervousness into something casual and friendly. The first time they'd met had been at a festival not unlike this one, where he'd found her hiding away from the festivities that even he described as 'a bit much.' She offered the man a hesitant, apologetic smile. "Are you okay?"