Navigation: Mile-High Woods |Round|1|2|3 He walked through the columns of the trees, his eyes wide. All around the two puffy flakes of snow began to fall, clinging to the vagabond’s soft fur and piling on the curve of the monkey’s back. It was beautiful. Eura, usually one to complain about the cold, kept her face turned to the sky, her mouth hanging open, waiting to catch the fuzzy snowflakes as they fell. Rogdar turned his head back to look at her and laughed briefly before he began to move again. Even in the particularly cold winter the pine trees kept their vibrant green sprays of needle-like leaves while the bare branches of oaks clawed at the sky. He gave a quiet “Hmm.” As he observed the lower hanging branches of the grey barked trees and tested the weight of one by lacing his front paws over its width and pushing down. It seemed sturdy enough. Eura quickly clambered down the slate wolf’s back, and easily scaled the body of the great tree with the natural skill of her species. “Hey! Wait for me!”He called, his companion already three branches above him and chittering mockingly from above.   Speaking  Thinking  You

He and his mother had returned north after she had left Ares and Lyra with Chaos. He didn’t know why - she always complained about the cold and the drab colors that the north had compared to the southern continent - but he suspected that she was still hoping to find his aunt Artemis. It was really strange being back without his sister and brother, and his mother wandered off for longer and longer periods. She always came back with food, but she wasn’t really the best company. Aquila was… lonely.

Usually he stayed pretty close to their current den, but today after his mother left to follow her snare line, he had decided on a whim to go exploring. He’d been staring hard at one of his mother’s snares here - it hadn’t been tripped, so he could observe the way she set it up and try to figure out how she did it and why she’d put it where she did, since she wasn’t particularly interested in teaching him right now - when a strange chittering noise that wasn’t quite like a squirrel caught his attention.

The nebula-marked youth trotted off in search of the sound, curiosity reeling him in until he could see a young adult wolf calling up to a strange looking creature chittering towards him from the branches. Aquila pricked his ears towards the pair, blinking in amazement at the little creature. He’d never seen anything like that! He wondered if it would be offended if he studied it… “Good morning, sir,” he said earnestly to the older wolf. He was probably barely an adult, but he was still an adult, and a stranger at that, so Aquila tried to put his best paw forward and show the other male all the respect a grown up was supposed to be given. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

Navigation: Mile-High Woods |Round|1|2|3 He tensed his back legs, ready to spring to a higher branch in front of him when a voice broke his concentration. He looked over the side of the branch he stood on, head cocked, then raised a brow as he attempted to make sense of who or what exactly he was seeing. At first he thought it was some kind of parrot; Saint’s knew there had been no shortage of the multihued birds on the distant shores he had fled, but he quickly noted that the eyes stared at him directly rather than on either side of its head. He was a wolf! . His jaw hung open slightly as realization dawned on him. His father had mentioned a girl in his old pack; Artis- or something- that was as blue as the sea, and her sister whose name he couldn’t place at all, who was as red as the dawn before a storm, but had never entertained the possibility that he might have been telling the truth. Eura, noticing her companion’s diverted attention quickly scaled back down to see what could have possibly been more exciting than racing up a tree. She dropped onto the slate wolf’s back but he hardly seemed to notice. "It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" He snapped back to attention quickly, his demeanor changing in an instant to one of confidence and (mostly feigned) pride. He had never been addressed as “sir” before, but quickly found it to his liking. Leaping briskly from the branch he landed almost effortlessly in front of the strangely colored boy. “It is indeed.” He replied with all the poise of a fully formed adult and seasoned adventurer. He glanced around quickly then; taking in the crystal blue skies, the snow piling on the branches of the trees, all in vivid daylight. Yes, it was a beautiful day, and he noted; a beautiful place. It was still early winter thankfully and the warm autumn meant that the true harshness of winter was thankfully a few weeks away. He looked down at the pup quickly, noting his plush fur and fairly round belly. He would be fine, he was sure. Speaking  Thinking You

Aquila's eyes rounded in interest as the chattering not-squirrel hopped onto the other wolf's back without the other wolf so much as batting an eye at it. He must have been used to the odd creature doing that, which meant the odd creature must be with him. The pup hadn't seen much in the way of his own kind, other than his mother, so he didn't quite place the surprise the other wolf had evinced on seeing him. After all, he was much more used to colorful wolves than normal wolves, so it never even occurred to him that he was anything unusual. Even his father, Chaos, had the silver banding in his fur that Aquila had inherited, and it had turned what should have been a black coat into a rippling canvas of blue and purple highlights in the light. Aquila glanced surreptitiously at this male's fur, but the black stayed black even when he moved, just like Chaos' did when they had been in the cave and there wasn't bright enough light to change the color. Maybe this male was the opposite, maybe he only changed color in the dark.

The oddity of his coloration and his clear relationship with the chattery not-squirrel elevated him to magic in Aquila's eyes. "Excuse me, sir," he said, a little hesitantly, "but I have never seen anything like your... animal." He didn't really know what to call it. He didn't have any concept of the word 'pet', and though he had seen the owls nesting outside his father's cave he hadn't really grasped the fact that they were actually with Chaos, and not just there. "You must be from really far away," he added with fascination.