Letheia is small for a wolf, and she knows it, and she has never once cared. She is slight and loose-limbed, the kind of slender that reads less as delicate and more as boneless, moving like something that has never been in a hurry, all slow rolling shoulders and paws that barely seem to lift from the ground. Her coat is a pale creamy white at its base, deepening across her back and haunches into layered grey and dark charcoal in loose scale like markings that give her fur an almost painted quality. Red freckling scatters across her chest and shoulders in irregular spatters, trailing down her forelegs in washes of deep rose and rust, and her tail sweeps dark and fades nearly to black at its tip.

Her eyes are two-toned, each iris split cleanly between warm amber-brown and vivid teal, and they are almost always half-lidded and unhurried, giving her the permanent look of someone who has just finished something very good and is already thinking about the next thing. She almost always has flowers on her as well, deep red blooms with dark leaves tucked behind an ear or draped across the base of her tail or woven into her ruff. She picks them herself and replaces them before they can wilt, and it is one of the few things she does with any real regularity or care. Without them she seems faintly incomplete, the way a table looks when someone has cleared away the candles.

Letheia is, above all else, a creature of warmth. She fills every room she enters the way smoke fills a closed space, slowly, completely, without asking permission, and she has a gift for making anyone near her feel as though they have just sat down after a very long walk. She is genuinely delighted by people, shameless about her own appetites, and theatrical about both. She will describe the smell of something cooking for longer than is strictly necessary. She will drag a story out to three times its natural length simply because she is enjoying the telling. She sprawls, she helps herself, she laughs easily, and she does all of it with the easy confidence of someone who has never once been told no in a way that stuck.

Underneath all of that warmth is something gently, persistently gravitational. Letheia does not force anyone to stay. She simply makes leaving feel increasingly unreasonable, refilling your cup before you notice it's empty, starting a new story right as you stand to go, asking one more question that requires sitting back down to answer properly. That particular moment when someone's shoulders drop and they finally settle in is her favorite thing in the world, and she arranges for it constantly, quietly, without ever appearing to try.

This is also where she becomes, without ever meaning to, genuinely dangerous. She doesn't believe she is taking anything from anyone. She believes, with full and peaceful conviction, that she is offering something most people are too frightened or too busy to accept, rest, pleasure, the relief of forgetting there was somewhere else to be. She has forgotten purpose and grief and urgency so completely that she no longer recognizes them as losses, and she would give you the same gift without hesitation, feeling tender and generous the entire time. The trap has no teeth. It's just a very comfortable place to lie down, and she will keep adding pillows until the door is too far away to bother with.

Kobold believes the world is dangerous, unfair, and already halfway to ending so you might as well laugh, leap, and steal something shiny