Eligos continued to wander the carnival, feeling uncommonly tired and numb, before moving away from the bustle to sit alone and watch the world go by. What was he doing with his life? Pining after someone he'd met once, while she'd moved on with her life, moved on to have children. To marry? Was she happy, with the family she'd built? He'd always known that there was no room for her in his world and that he was a fool and worse for ever entertaining the thought, but it had always been there in the back of his mind, the maybe. And all along he'd been letting the opportunity slip through his grasp instead of reaching out for it. What was wrong with him, that he'd gotten his heart caught up with someone unobtainable instead of being able to find himself attracted to someone he could actually have? He thought back to all the women in his life that he'd known and felt... nothing. Nothing stirred in him when he made himself think of Aurielle as a woman instead of an alpha. Nothing stirred in him when he thought of Theory, or Paradise. They were just... people. He felt no more interest in them than he did in the men he knew.

Growling deep in his chest he pressed a paw to his his eyes, rubbing them to ease the ache building in his head. What was it about him that he was so incapable of being the man he had to be to lead his family? He didn't even have a reason to be angry at Poem about it, who had been blithely innocent of any interest he'd had in her since he'd never bothered to show it or act on it, but he could feel the anger building beneath the hurt, the desire to lash out at the unaccustomed pain and blame her for his own foolishness and shortcomings. It would have been so much easier... but he closed his eyes and growled aloud, pressing harder til the physical pain distracted him and eased him back into numbness.

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?"

A sudden familiar voice had him drop his paw away from his aching head to blink at Aryn. Blink, because the sight of her was not as familiar as it should have been. The small set of antlers was very unexpected, as was the sight of the normally dreamy, peaceful girl wearing what appeared to be leather armor. "Aryn?" he said with faint surprise in his voice, though it was less a question than a startled exclamation. He stood and stepped closer, his eyes studying her as though seeing her for the first time, before shaking his head. "I don't hate crowds. I only needed a moment's space to rest," he finally answered her, ignoring her second question. No, he wasn't ok. No, he wasn't going to tell anyone that. "And you? You seem..." He frowned as he swept her more closely with an increasingly intense gaze. "What happened?"

Aryn straightened slightly as he stepped closer to her, her heart pounding hard beneath the weight of his scrutinizing gaze. The black and gold alpha did not give much away, a fact that she was beginning to grow used to. She was left to draw her own conclusions, her paws shuffling slightly as she struggled beneath his analysis and prolonged silence.

"I'm sorry, I don't mean to intrude upon your space." Aryn managed softly, taking an instinctive step backwards as if it was her who'd stepped to him. He questioned her then and Aryn's paw lifted to her chest once more in brief panic, brushing against the comforting leather before finding it's place back upon the grass. "Nothing's happened, I'm fine." She returned, a polite smile crossing her maw briefly. "Deflecting, are we?"

"Am I?" he echoed her, his voice deepening as he took step to keep her from opening the distance. He quirked a brow at her. "It does seem like one of us is, doesn't it? What happened?" There was more than a hint of growl to his last, rumbled words. His temper quivered to life, denied outlet for his hurt over Poem and seeing in Aryn's frayed state a possibility to be unleashed. There was something noticeably off about her, about the way she stood, the way she moved, the way she reacted to him. She reminded him of prey, and not simply for the new antlers that graced her skull. Reminded of them, leaning forward, passed his normal comfort zone, he gently touched one of those new-grown antlers with his nose. "What happened, Aryn?" he repeated, gentling his tone.

His presence grew only more intimidating as he pushed harder, her soft pink eyes blinking slowly as his question escalated into almost a growl. The fur upon her spine began to rise, remembering the depth of Recluse's snarl before she'd maimed her. That was, after all, why Aryn had decided to learn to defend herself - and though the idea of bearing tooth or claw to Eligos was laughable and wrong, her body grew defensive at his persistence.

"I'm fine." She snapped, though the breathlessness of her voice softened the bite to it. Eligos leaned forward and as as his muzzle passed above her head, her lip began to wrinkle in the beginnings of a snarl.

Oh. His nose booped upon her horns and her ears flattened, muzzle smoothing as she dipped her head in a brief moment of shame. Heat flushed to her cheeks and she blew out an uneasy breath. "Oh, um, I don't know what happened there." It had been too easy to forget her new horns, and Aryn struggled to remember the circumstances that brought them about while her embarrassment began to fade. Her first instinct was to admit that she thought of them as some sort of blessing, though saying that aloud to a man who wholeheartedly believed in his faith had more weight to it then she was comfortable with. "I was sick, I don't remember."  

For a moment he thought Aryn was going to bite him, her posture changing to something defensive like a cornered fox, before she seemed to realize what he was doing and relaxed. He looked down at her with a flat, unreadable expression for a moment, the kind that in its very unreadableness was very telling. He didn't back away after touching her antlers, but he didn't step forward again either. It was clear she wasn't telling him everything, but he let it go. For now. "You caught the sickness as well? I had hoped you had been able to avoid it, though I suppose it was not a very realistic hope, considering our last encounter." With the ghost canine, and all.

He turned his head away slightly, putting a little bit of emotional distance between them, trying to putting a leash back on his temper. Aryn had done nothing to earn that. "Are you enjoying the carnival?"

While he remained where he stood, Aryn felt Eligos' presence retreat. The relief was immediate, but was followed quickly by emotion she couldn't quite decipher. In the absence of his hovering she was able to calm herself further, though in the back of her mind flared the worry of the damage that may have been done to one of her few friendships in such a short moment of time. "I did, shortly after that encounter." There was a weight to her words and her frown returned, though it was not unusual for a wolf to be solemn remembering their time during the plague when so many had suffered so heavily. "Did you as well?" Without thinking her eyes roamed his frame, seeking evidence of the infection. He did not seem worse for the wear, but she hadn't forgotten the pain in his growl minutes earlier and could not assume it was unrelated.

Another question came and her gaze tore from him, her head turning briefly to the bustle of wolves they'd both peeled away from. "Not really." She admitted with a small, cautious laugh. "I find lately I, at least, don't like crowds."

There was a quality of wary circling to their conversation that there had never really been in the past, a guardedness that put distance between them that he was surprised to realize hadn't been there. Once he would have been pleased that the perennially chipper, childish girl had grown to have a suitably respectful wariness, but now he was irrationally irritated by it. Maybe he'd grown used to her always showing up to annoy him and need saving. Maybe her cheery ignorance of what he really was had been pleasant after so much distrust. Maybe her looking up to him had stoked his ego. Whatever it was, he was surprisingly upset to see it go. It took him a moment to pick the thread of the conversation back up. "Yes, I also succumbed around that time. Perhaps the... being in the forest infected us both." He didn't speak of what had happened while he was sick. That particular wound was still weeping, and sharing that he had murdered his niece would also certainly not bring the Aryn of old back. He looked back at the carnival himself, taking more of the pressure off her. "There is a lot to be learned in observing crowds," he said quietly. "But being part of them is certainly... overrated."

Eligos was unreadable as always, though Aryn watched him carefully as he spoke. It was difficult to determine from where her hesitance stemmed, it may have been a subconscious response to seeing the wolf who was present with her when she'd been infected, it may have been that Recluse's anger had ruined for her the innocence of expecting the best in others. Perhaps it was being raised beneath her father's negative opinion of Abraxas wolves. Whatever it was, Aryn knew it wasn't fair to take it out on her friend.

She fell back on her haunches, sitting carefully upon the grass and following his gaze to the ongoing festival. "That's your problem then." She mused softly. "It's supposed to be a festival about romance, you're supposed to come with someone to enjoy it." It was a strained attempt at poking fun at the solemn man, though it fell flat against the guardedness that hung between them.

It was not surprising that he'd been affected by the sickness too, though there was no doubt in her mind that he handled it better than she had. "I ran away." She admitted after a moment of silence, her disappointment in herself clear in her tone. "When I was sick, I ran away from Habari. I don't know if they'll ever forgive me for it." Aryn fixed her gaze back at him, an unspoken question in her eyes. Eligos was an alpha just as Recluse was - how well would he have taken a deserter, during a global plague?

Eligos almost flinched at Aryn's attempt at teasing, so close on the heels of his revelations about Poem. "Is that why you're here instead of there?" he snapped back. "You didn't seem to have a difficult time finding romance at the last party I had to rescue you from." Immediately he flushed, feeling inexplicably guilty, and expelled a deep breath. "I'm sorry. That was uncalled for."

Cursing himself for being an ass, and an idiot, he cast around for a change of subject because as much as he was being moody and irritable, he didn't particularly want to chase her off. He latched onto the subject of the illness, though that was hardly something he wanted to pursue either. "The illness made many of us take actions that we later regret," he said quietly. "At least what you did, didn't hurt anyone. Your alpha would be worse than a fool if they held you accountable for falling prey to it."

Aryn recoiled like she'd been slapped, pink eyes blinking hard and fast against his sudden and harsh response. Her ears pulled flat against her skull, her head lowering in shame at the memory. It was mere moments before he was already apologizing, but the damage had been done. His next words were softer, more understanding, and lacked the moody bite to them, though it was hard to feel reassured on the heels of his insult. "No, Eligos, that's not why I'm here." She murmured, hurt. With each heavy beat of her heart it felt as if her scars grew tighter, a painful reminder of something else Recluse took from her - her beauty, her grace, that hope that one day a man might give her a happily ever after.

Her muzzle tipped up to regard the bird who circled high above, watching quietly in case Aryn attempted to escape once more. "They hold me accountable, and I should go before you insult my alpha further and I'm held accountable for that, as well." She sighed and moved to stand, her muzzle dropping once more as it became apparent the bird was ready to follow. "Enjoy the carnival."

-attempted exit-