Aurelia smiled. It was as always, all moonsilver teeth bared; like expressing emotion was something Aurelia had to approach with her weapons drawn in case it turned into a fight. Solulfur let the knives in her own smile gleam in the sunlight, the edges turned away so they were harmless. Aurelia offered a simple, but sincere I should love to see the rest of it, and Solulfur's shoulders visibly dropped as she set down the last dredges of tension she hadn't realized she'd carried. There was a simple warmth in her molten gaze, and she met Aurelia's spring-bloom green to convey a hint of appreciation held in the golden depths.
This place, hollowed out as it was of her kin, was a place of pain for Solulfur. Like a thorn wedged deep in her paw, it ached with every beat of her heart. But Aurelia's presence here, her unshakable steadiness and quiet enthusiasm, dislodged that thorn from its presence in Solulfur's mind for the moment. There were good memories and beautiful things on this ancestral land of hers, too. Solulfur wanted to share that with Aurelia. She wanted to....not rot, in this moment. But to blossom.
Her tail whisked the air at her hips, and she turned toward the cavern she knew lay just ahead before Solulfur stood and beamed dumbly at Aurelia for so long it became awkward. A strange kind of fluttery nervousness took up space in her chest. What to show first? Perhaps she shouldn't - maybe a hunt would be more productive, assuming the carcass would follow them back into the Vale's embrace once they returned. Her mind skittered across landmarks, memories from her childhood that she had put out of her mind for a long, long time. She hadn't quite made a decision about where to begin, when she realized her pawsteps had already chosen.
The mouth of the cave was stone, but hardy alpine lichen and even some moss dappled the piled stones and footholds in the mountainside. The top of the cave had an outcropping of stone, a ledge that Solulfur had spent many mornings atop and many thunderstorms sheltering beneath, watching the rain pour off the edge of the ledge with the resting piles of her family nestled in the winding cavern behind her.
She stepped inside without hesitation, listening to the sound of her exhale bouncing off the frigid stone walls, and glanced over her shoulder at the silver she-wolf Solulfur hadn't once doubted would follow.
This is as good a place to begin.They would find a goat to chase on the way. She didn't want to admit that she had never caught one, either. She'd broken her leg as a pup, then gone with her mother to hunt a man down once her leg was healed. There hadn't been a chance for her to tackle that kind of challenging prey, but she knew the concepts behind it.
This is where I began. My brothers and I were born here, and my cousins. My mother and all her sisters and brother before her.Her father was a foreigner, his blood warmed by the springtime lushness of the Gossamer Pool down by the seaside. Maybe that was why he'd - no.
She would not sour this too-precious moment with the Shakti-Vaes with pondering him and the wound he'd left on her soul. Aurelia deserved the whole of the Black Sun's attention, and she gave it with a assessing glance over her shoulder at the other woman.
