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likely loosely backdated, searching for Yakone but all are welcome | roughly 11 months/a year

It did not come wholly as a surprise. Trygve aimed not to smother the muradoii orphan with his presence; and he was used to living either alone, or at a distance. He told himself he was more comfortable at arm's length, and kept himself busy practicing his hunting, his foraging, and harassing foxes and scavengers away from his meals - sometimes shared with the red-eyed aurora, flitting like ethereal mist over the moors, sometimes not.

There was an unspoken understanding in their companionship he'd never felt with another - not that he'd had many opportunities to, but nonetheless, it was novel and wholly comforting; sniped insults and the occasional bared fang rolled off like water off a duck's back.

And then she was gone. The similarities to Akira did not go unnoticed, but unlike the frail, mahogany woman, Trygve held no such immediate understanding and whole-hearted belief of her abandonment and its righteous reasoning. Instead of a forced resignation, an effort to bury whatever feelings he had about the situation, Trygve got to his paws and set about looking for the girl. She was lost, or playing games, or hunting, or hurt, or lost. He did not entertain abandonment - his mind would not allow it, flinching from the concept like a hot stove.

Akira had left. Yakone was different. Trygve's paws carried his body with easeful, lengthy strides over the open, rolling fields. His nose brushed through the grasses, and he tilted his muzzle into the breeze, but he did not expect to pick up her trail that way; his tracking, he thought, left something to be desired. He looked instead for signs - carcasses or blood smeared on blades of yellowing wheat, wildflowers, tufts of silver and sable caught on heather bushes. Nothing, as if she'd dissolved into seafoam.

Trygve sought out the scents of other wolves, after days of other hunting methods and still neither hide nor hair. He refused to settle for the obvious opportunity to leave dead weight behind. Perhaps she had crossed paths with another of her kind. He would ask have you seen a girl, eyes like a blood-red sunrise, dripping with as much venom as a cobra? I need to find her, I need to find her, I need to know she's alright. Perhaps, he mused, it was a ruse - intended purely to pry such embarrassing admissions from him.

He would hate to give her the satisfaction, but he'd hate all the worse to leave her out there, alone. Or maybe he just couldn't bear the thought of leaving himself alone out there, on the seemingly endless moors and the strange whispers in the mists. A shameful thought, one he refused to face as much as he refused to admit the idea of being left behind. Again.

He didn't know anymore. Trygve lifted his head above a thicket of sage, casting his gaze across a flourishing view that did not hold the one thing he sought. Frustration - and fear - brewed within his breast, cowlicked pelt tousled in the brusque autumnal breeze.

What was it Briar longed after, searched for, ached over? There was no face she pictured in the dark of night when her paws took her to new lands, no voice that guided her through the suffocating shadows, not even the warm embrace of a ghost barely remembered. It just just Thorn's rasping caw and the wind of the wide open world whistling in her ears as she searched for her next high. That's all there seemed to be in a world made of lost dreams and heartache hidden behind venom; the hair-raising, blood-lusting, intrinsic, visceral need to get her heart racing as fast as it could before it gave out. Adrenaline setting her aflame from the inside out, it was a curse she'd enjoyed since the day she was born, a curse she suspected she inherited --like so many other intangible shadows-- from her hellfire sire. Chasing that warmth, it was all that had ever driven her. She'd never felt more at home than the short moments in which she could bask in the feeling that she was doing something right; nothing, no herb or being or place, had ever offered her that same sense of strength, of euphoria.

For a while, having even the smallest of purposes was nice. She didn't enjoy being her dam's little errand girl, but when being helpful meant going to see her brothers or harassing a pack somewhere, well, it was hard to say no. Now... Ophelia was gone. Briar would find her again, she was sure. None of the Deadwood demons were ever gone forever. One day, a scent trail would pop back up, or Thorn would pull her off-course with a welcoming song. But Cedar and Calyx had their own life now, she didn't know where any others were, Aktaion or Deadwood alike.... and she didn't know what to do. Solving Cypress' murder had been Ophelia's mission, it wasn't Briar's. She barely understood the complicated emotions around her crimson sire's death, and she wasn't going to throw herself into a suicide mission for the memory of a man she had barely liked but loved dearly.

She skulked in some random direction, tail kinked over her back and ears laying against her neck. Deep in unwanted thoughts and features twisted, she didn't hear Thorn's first caw of warning; the suspicious, low tone heralding a stranger. He continued to flap a few lengths ahead from his place above her, but wheeled about to dive down with a sharper caw. His landing was brutal, talons sinking into the loose flesh of her shoulders and prompting a snarl.

"You feathered bat," she hissed crossly, but there was a fondness behind her harsh tone. He'd scared her enough to get her heart racing good and properly, and immediately, her mood lightened despite the blood soaking into her back. He repeated the insistent, almost worried caw, and her head finally lifted to survey her surroundings. What the hell did he see? It was wide open moors, a sage thicket, and nothi-- oh.

A dual-colored face peered above it.

Briar just stared, too off-guard to be snarky first.

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It was the bird that caught his eye first; a dark raven, and he recalled a similarly iridescent black feather adorning the aurora's sable-flecked fur. Trygve watched the bird cross the clear blue sky, until his gaze landed on the raven's target.

A girl his age, colored like a cardinal, viscerally bright against the muted sage and verdant tones of the fields. The boy's brows furrowed at first, wary as always when first thrust into interaction with strangers. His first instinct was to retreat, but he'd come this far hunting his own kind. Here stood one, who might have the answers he sought. After his initial hesitation, Trygve moved with ease, crossing the distance between the yearlings. Hello. He said plainly, and halted at a comfortably far distance.

He felt horribly awkward. Hello? He wished to crawl under the sage-bush and stay there until the girl forgot about all of this and went home. But he had a mission.