Aquila had been on his own for quite some time now. He was a year and a half old, not a pup, so the solitude didn't bother him as much as it could have. Still, he missed being around others, as little as he had done so as a pup, but he was simply too shy to seek out company. So instead of company, he spent his days wandering and exploring, learning the world around him and the ways of the forest. That was how he found himself here at the edges of a strange forest.

At first there didn't seem to he anything too odd about it, though the trees were a species he had never seen before. But... were they growing in the water? And what was that? He cocked his head to the side, wading through the cold, shallow water to get closer to a tree to peer at it through the evening darkness. The water had begun to glow softly as he moved, and where the tree trailed branches and roots in the water, the light had gathered around it in ripples of ever widening concentric circles of the soft bioluminence that rippled around his own paws. It made for a fascinating, enchanting sight. Like a fairy tree, lighting the world around it as it dipped and swayed over the water in the breeze.

Gazing at the scene Jupiter didn't know what he found more curious, the tree or the wolf beneath it. It wasn't every day he came across someone who's coat was wilder than his. On the other hand, he at least had experience with brightly colored wolves so perhaps the tree won out here.

With Amadeus sitting high on his neck Jupiter padded closer, his gaze casually flicking between the other yearling and the tree. In the end his curiosity for the unknown won out and he fixed his attention on the unusual tree. "I can't say," he said softly because of the ambiance or whatever - the weird tree was throwing him off, okay - "I've ever seen a tree like that before."

Aquila glanced away from the tree a moment in surprise when someone spoke, before his gaze was drawn back to the unusual way the water's bio-luminescence played with the tree. Immediately though he twisted back again to look more closely at the wolf who'd come up, a sight every bit as unusual as the tree. The cyan markings in the wolf's fur might almost have been a trick of the bio-luminescent glow around them, but a closer look showed Aquila that no, the wolf's fur was as unusual as his own, and a primate of some sort clung to his neck like a growth. "I..." Aquila stammered to a halt, wide-eyed, then tried again. Like the older boy, his own voice remained quiet, dampened by the seeming magic of the tree. "I've never seen anything like it either." He fell silent a moment, letting himself become mesmerized by the dance of tree and water, but the other boy occupied as much of his curiosity now as the glow did. In his travels, he'd spent a lot of it alone, but the few loners he did meet outside his family had always had such drab earthen coats. What had once seemed unusual and exotic he'd learned was actually the normal way of things, and that he himself was the oddity. So to meet a complete stranger with a coat like one of his siblings... He cleared his throat. "My name is Aquila Aeris," he said softly, not taking his eyes off the tree.

Jupiter’s attention might have remained fixed on the tree too had not the other boy’s introduction surprised him. Perhaps it shouldn’t have - how many families of brightly colored wolves could there be in Boreas? - but it did. He glanced at the other yearling and eyed him up and down. Aquila appeared to be about the same age as him so they couldn’t be siblings. Cousins, maybe?

“Aeris, huh?” He asked nonchalantly, secretly hoping for a reaction. “That’s my mother’s last name.” Though he had been given a hyphenated last name at birth, in the months after Artemis’ disappearance the boy had decided to drop the Aeris name. It seemed fitting to abandon it as he had been abandoned. Though he didn’t have the best of relationships with his father Angelus at least had made an effort to look out for him - even though the boy had made it clear he didn’t want him to.

“I’m Jupiter Imperialis.” His gaze roved back to the tree and he frowned thoughtfully. After a beat he commented. “I don’t know much about my mom’s side of the family. Does the name Artemis mean anything to you?”