Cassiel's travels had brought him away from the land where he'd buried his sire beneath a cairn. He wondered if he was supposed to be saddened to know that he was an orphan now. He wondered if Senka would be if he told her. He decided it was better not to find out, and resolved again not to tell her.

Glancing around his current location, his nose wrinkled. Water was everywhere, even where he'd need to walk unless he wanted to clamber in an undignified manner over uneven mangrove roots and risk falling into the water anyway, so his paws felt disgusting and wrinkled beneath the grey fur and the chilly autumn air meant that they were starting to hurt from the cold. He'd smelled the scents of loners strongly enough here to indicate that they lived here, but he found that hard to believe. Who could possibly put up with this nonsense for longer than it took to walk through?

He gave a grumpy, faint growling noise as he attempted to flick a little of the water off one paw. Ugh. He was going to have to try to take a break up on those roots to warm his paws before he went any further. Grumbling to himself under his breath, he hopped up onto the flattest, driest rootball he could find and tucked his paws underneath him. Since his belly fur had gotten wet in places too, it was a little unpleasant, but he knew eventually his body heat would start to cut through the effects of the cool fall weather. Eventually. With an imprecation he settled himself down to brood.

It was hard to say how often he had traveled to the mangrove; time had become strange to him and he found that even his memories of puphood had become distant. He could however remember the last time he had come to the mangroves and felt the heat of a blush creep up his neck. He skulked through the mangroves with his head low, his chin nearly touching the brackish water, entirely indifferent to the muck that clung to his long legs. He had come to the mangroves again scouting for the lands that his pack would call home. “What pack?” He reminded himself and felt a twinge of fury in his heart. If Acere and Elias’s latest litter remained they had not sought him out, not even when he called for them on the remains of Mount Vulcan. “Traitors” He thought coldly. He broke from his reverie at the scent of a stranger his ear twitching as he heard a faint growl on the wind. He paced calmly in the male’s direction if only because meeting someone would keep his mind off of his traitorous family. At first he hardly noticed him, his coat blending almost seamlessly into the ash gray mangrove roots and the shadows casted by the snarling depths beneath the trees. If he hadn’t seen the flicker of bright orange eyes he might have missed him entirely. He raised his head formally then gave a short, greeting bark, his tail slack and nonthreatening behind him. Speech, Thought, You

A soft bark brought Cassiel's attention from where he was working up a really good sulk. He blinked and focused his gaze on a slightly older, slightly taller, leggy black male who seemed to have none of his own reservations about standing in the chilly water. "Oh lovely, someone else stupid enough to be wandering around in this cock-up," his mouth said in a particularly sullen manner before his brain caught up to it. He eyed the other male and wrinkled his nose before puffing out a sigh that steamed the cold air in front of him. "You're going to get a case of trenchfoot, you keep standing about in the wet like you are. Pads'll fall right off and you'll be limping for ages until the new fills in. Could get infected right easy. Gangrene. It isn't pretty." The graphic words were spoken in a distant, clinical manner, his head tilted to look down at the other male disapprovingly. What? An ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. His pawpads fell off and he'd be crying for the nearest healer to save his feet, wouldn't he? And who did it seem that would end up being? You guessed it... Cassiel. He narrowed his mismatched eyes at the male and finished up simply, "Get yourself up out of the water, then. Dry off."

He paused, clearly surprised by the male’s indignation but obeyed if not begrudgingly. With his paws sloshing in the muck Tyranis leapt onto a knot of branches directly in front of the male and shook his fur off, being sure he was far enough from the male to avoid splashing him. Kai hadn’t seemed to mind it, but he couldn’t say with any certainty that the stranger wouldn’t. He wiped his paws against the roots if only because the other male had seemed so concerned about them and settled onto his belly, his head raised and ears alert. “You sound like my mother.” He said, more idle than insulting, his golden eyes trailing away from the male as he yawned hungrily. Speech, Thought, You

The male obeyed, and Cassiel nodded sharply. Though he did eye the other wolf with a dismayed sort of wariness when he leaped onto the roots right in front of him to shake off, and watched him with a disapproving frown to make sure he didn't spray Cassiel with muddy water in drying himself off. He didn't, though, and Cassiel eased back down without really having been aware that he'd tensed up and nearly risen to his feet. He had a cold, wet, miserable life of his own without being subjected to everyone else's cold wet muddy misery all over him, and he'd been fully prepared to scramble further away on the roots if it had become clear he'd need to retreat from the splash zone.

His jaw clenched involuntarily at the wolf's comment, eyes half-narrowing as a memory arrowed through his heart. Senka as a pup, shouting at him for some bossy thing he'd said, 'you can't tell me what to do, you're not my mother!' How it had nearly come to a fight between the two spunky pups before their mother had stepped between them and chided them. How even then she'd been tired and thin and if he'd ever realized that he was going to lose her he would never have wasted all that time...

"Well," he started in a strangled, half-angry voice before falling silent a moment to fiercely banish the memory and the choking grief. Inconvenient emotions wrestled back into their box, he continued somewhat sharply, with a huff, "Well, I would bloody well hope so. What sort of mum would let her sprog's paw pads rot off in the mud?" He shook his head, a short, irritated motion as he glared at the mucky water surrounding the roots. "Shithole of a land anyway," he muttered half to himself. "No fit place for a wolf."