RIP Misty Mourning - you were a good boi ;_; Saving thread for the Lore, read for feels
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RIP Misty Mourning - you were a good boi ;_; Saving thread for the Lore, read for feels
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Posted 2021-06-11 04:25:15 (edited)
The lunar wanderer
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 Zea #27549 |
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Posted 2021-07-05 07:50:16 (edited)
Pup Showcase
Special
Cool
Monochrome
Warm
Muted
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Zea #27549 |
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Posted 2021-07-05 09:00:15 (edited)
Art Showcase Full Moon By hydde
New Moon
YWH by andy
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Zea #27549 |
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Posted 2021-08-07 04:52:03 (edited)
Even if Misty wanted to go back... he can't. His old pack is gone. This epitomizes the feeling I get, sometimes, when I visit my hometown. I've graduated. got a job. bought a house. gotten married. I have my own life, now. When I go to my parent's house for the holidays - the same house they have lived in since 1989 - it's... different. I can never recreate the memories and times I once had, there. Getting old(er) is exciting and challenging and fulfilling. But sometimes... that feeling of Hiraeth hits me like a ton of bricks. Spontaneite captured that feeling perfectly in this story. GOING HOME Some days are easier than others. Some days, he wakes, and his heart is clear; the den is full of sunlight, the air is alive with the chattering of rainforest birds, and the verdant scent of the greenery seems almost comforting in his nose. This is not one of those days. He wakes from a dream of less earthly lands with the taste of moondust on his tongue, heart full to bursting with the memory of home. For a second after he wakes – for only a second – he lifts his head, and blinks, and thinks that he is still where he belongs. In the next second, he knows better. He weeps in the way that all wolves weep: whimpering, body huddled into the leafy ground, whining from a throat that gasps and shudders and aches with the weight of the humid air. It's wrong. It's all wrong. The air should be clearer, thinner – the sunbeams in the den should be glittering blue, there should be lights in the sky, there should be lights everywhere- He closes his eyes, and thinks of home, and in that moment feels that his heart is cracking open in his chest. This isn't home. He's always known that. But sometimes, the knowing feels like a far fresher wound than it ought. Eventually, he calms himself. His breath goes quiet again. He staggers upright, and leaves the secluded den that he keeps alone. No one has disturbed him, though they must have scented his distress; he has kept himself apart from them ever since they took him in, and they respect his privacy. No one ever comes. Still, though, a few of his packmates shoot him sympathetic glances as he passes, looking as though they might come over, as if they might greet him. But he is hurting, and doesn't want their pity. On a day like this, there's only one thing to do. He turns his nose North, and runs. --- Months later, the lead wolf comes to him one evening as he returns, pausing to look him over. He knows he always makes for a sorry sight when he returns from the faraway glacier, what with his fur wet from melted frost and snow, paw-pads cracked by the vicious dry bite of the frigid earth… "Did you find anything new?" he asks, eventually, padding closer and pressing his nose into the hollow behind Hiraeth's left ear. He lowers his tail. "Only what I brought you," he answers, and Aces draws back to regard him. He knows well what this expedition brought back: a bone, and a mouthful of feathers. The pups commandeered them in an instant, so it's not as though they were worthless, but… The lead stands there for a moment, noncommittal. Then he sighs, and nudges Hiraeth until he sits down, planting the whole of his weight down beside him. "It's not necessary, you know," he says, eventually. "Scouting the northern lands so often. We know everything we need to, I think. You could stay closer to home – if you wanted to." Hiraeth stays silent. He doesn't say, those lands are the closest I will ever come to home again. It's true, but he hesitates to share it. Even now, even so long after he was found…it feels too raw. "There's space on a hunting party soon, if you want it," Aces adds, when he says nothing. "Tot mentioned you, when I asked who she wanted joining the rest. You'd be welcome." He does shift a little at that. The pack's top hunter has always been friendly to him, and far less responsive to his attempts to seclude himself than everyone else. It's annoying sometimes, but… "I appreciate it," he says in the end, quiet, but gives no answer to the offer itself either way. The lead wolf clearly senses that he won't get anything else from him today, so he shakes his neck fur out, leans in to give a friendly snuffle along Hiraeth's snout, and then stands. "The offer is open to you, if you ever change your mind," he claims, and finally pads away. He's a busy wolf, after all. As much as he obviously worries, he can't fuss over his strangest packmate all day. Hiraeth watches him go. He isn't sure whether to feel guilty or relieved. --- He never had any intention of accepting the hunters' offer. But as the weeks stretch on, and he returns from journey after journey, he starts to get more company than he is accustomed to. "Hello, what's this?" Tot says, poking her nose past the vines that obscure the entrance to his den. "You're back? And looking as damp as ever, I see. What do you do, jump into every snowdrift you find?" Hiraeth eyes her, and doesn't uncurl from where he'd been resting. He's tired. He just came back from a three-day run. So, instead of answering, he just huffs and lowers his head. Unfortunately, it doesn't dissuade her. "You should take shorter trips," she informs him, plodding over and then falling down heavily beside him. She curls up with him like she belongs there, utterly shameless and ignoring his quiet warning growls. "Or, you know, just not take them at all." "I like the tundra," he tells her, a little sulkily. She's developed this spectacularly irritating habit of refusing to let him alone, whenever he returns. She also tends to appear whenever he starts smelling too upset, like she's determined to comfort him, whether he likes it or not. And with her immense bulk, it's not like there's any moving her once she decides where she wants to be. Sometimes, too, she's a little more observant than he'd prefer. Right now she lifts her head and cocks her head at him, and says "That's where we found you. Isn't it?" He goes still. "You were an even sorrier sight back then," she says, ears flicking outwards. "Just a teeny, tiny little soggy lump of fur. Barely more than a yearling. We'd have thought you were some kind of runaway, if it weren't for all that conspicuous glowing you do." She stares at him narrowly. "You never did tell us where you came from." Hiraeth turns his head away, and doesn't answer. His heartbeat feels too heavy. "Well, that's your choice," she decides eventually, but doesn't leave. Most wolves leave, when they fail to convince him to talk, or to stay, or to do whatever they were hoping for. But she…she just stays stubbornly at his side, like a particularly furry and muscular slab of rock. "Are you staying?" He asks eventually, perturbed, and she turns her nose to snort into his fur. "I most definitely am," she confirms, and shuffles at his side to get comfy. It's baffling. It's irritating. It's…surprisingly nice. He huffs at her, conflicted, but is intelligent enough to know he can't move her. He sighs and accepts his fate. And thus opens a new chapter in his life. --- Tot shoves her way into his life with all the subtlety and finesse of a charging bison, and then refuses to leave. She interrupts his mourning one afternoon to nip him and prod him until he finally concedes to follow her out of the den and "play with a puppy or sniff a flower or something, because you obviously need it". She abducts him to socialise with her hunting party, fresh from the kill, snatching up the choicest entrails before the rest of the pack can get at them, and generously offers him some of the liver. It's not a one-time occurrence, either. Steadily, bit by bit, she bullies and cajoles and coaxes him into some semblance of a normal life. He always held himself apart before, by preference. The pack had taken him in, but…some part of him, particularly back then, had been convinced – against all odds – that one day he would find his way back to what he'd lost. That this was all…transitory, temporary; certainly nothing to get attached to, or even used to. Even now, he has that hope. It's a hard thing to let go of. But he can't hold himself entirely apart anymore. The pups used to go quiet when he passed, as if in the presence of an outsider. They'd whisper about him when they thought he couldn't hear, scattered stories of the things he yelps in his sleep sometimes, the strange smell of him, his mismatched eyes and the otherworldly light that clings to his fur. He wasn't a packmate, to them. Not really. It only took a few days to change that. Now, they get under his paws as readily as they do anyone else's, and occasionally even tumble into his den to pester him and play-hunt his tail. It reminds him of his littermates…which hurts, a little. But not as much as it used to. One month when her hunters are exhausted but she still has energy to spare, Tot invites herself along on his latest excursion. "This is private, you know," he tells her, without hope that it'll do any good. "Is it really?" she asks airily, tail flicking as she passes him. "Here I thought you were just scouting." He sighs, ears slanting sideways, and keeps walking. There'll be no dissuading her, he knows. And, after all this time…it feels like less of an intrusion than he'd thought, to have her along. So he runs North, and his friend follows. She follows through the dry heat of the desert, and the cool humidity of the northern forests, and finally to a place where the grass is scrubby and the air biting-cold and the wind howls like a living thing. The tundra plays tricks on you, like that; listen long enough, and you might almost think that the wind calls with a voice you remember. Hiraeth stopped listening to the phantom in the wind a long, long time ago. It always lies. Finally he stops at a familiar place. Just a bare patch of ground. It looks like nothing in particular at the moment; it rarely looks remarkable at all. There's nothing special about it, except for that this is where his world changed. Tot doesn't fail to realise it, either. Her eyes are sharp, her nostrils flaring as she sniffs at the air, ears cocked forwards to the empty ground. "This is where we found you," she says, and slowly, he dips his head. He says nothing for a long time, and eventually she speaks again. "Is this where you come, every time you leave? Back here?" He whuffles into the bristles of the grass, disconsolate. "More or less." "Why?" she asks first, reflexively. And then "What are you searching for?" At that he laughs, teeth cold in the open air. "I don't even know that myself, anymore." There are days where he doubts everything. Days where he thinks that the time before – his true life, his true home – was all a particularly vivid dream. That he is nothing but a lost, confused foundling whose mind was addled in the cold. He knows better, though. It was a dream. But not the kind that's any less real than the ground that, even now, is biting at his paws. It was real. It was his home. And he can never go back. His tail droops low, but it isn't enough to hide the scent of his distress. Tot presses close, a comforting weight against his side. "Where did you come from, Misty?" she asks him. It's not the first time. But it is the first time he answers. His ears flick outwards. "Somewhere…else. I don't know that I can explain it." He sighs, and his breath spins white wind-ghosts into the air. "Here, but…not. I was born there. I grew up there. And one day-" his breath hitches into a whine. "-One day I was here." One day, he was here, and the world was all wrong, and he could never go home again. "I can't go back," he confesses to her, the first time he's ever said it to a living soul. He's never cried it to anything more substantial than the wind. "I've tried. I've tried for so long. But I'm just…here." She stays quiet for a while, pressing her nose into the fur on his cheek. Then she says "You're here, now." He eyes her. "That's what I just said." "You're here, now," she repeats, and then shoves him backwards without warning. He yelps and tumbles over his own paws before he manages to right himself, staring around at her in betrayal. "So, you can't go back, and it bites. That's no reason to chase your sorrows for the rest of your fool life, Misty. Turn your nose around, we're going home." A line of fur bristles along his spine. "Weren't you listening? Home-" "Your first home is gone," she tells him bluntly, and it feels like she's crushed his ribcage under her paws. "You've done your mourning for that. You might always be doing your mourning for it. But you've got another home, now. If you don't stop and appreciate where you are, instead of where you used to be, you'll be nothing but a sack of fur and memories, and not a proper wolf at all. That's no way to spend a life. So, we're going home," she shoves him again, and this time he skitters back, staring at her wide-eyed. "To our home. My home, your home, home. It might not be a mystical, perfect tundra otherland, but it's good enough. Move your shiny paws and maybe we'll even get there before winter sets in." He's too shocked, in that moment, to really respond to the words. His fur bristles, and his hackles rise, but she isn't having any of it; she's decided they're going home, so homewards they will go. He stumbles along where she pushes, bewildered and hurting and affronted all at once, and it takes a while for any of it to start sinking in. Callous, he thinks of her, early on. Uncaring, not appreciating the pain of what he entrusted to her… …But that's not true, and he knows it. She cares. She cares a great deal. He stays quiet for the entirety of that first day. "I'm not going to forget it," he tells her, when night has fallen and there's nothing but their eyes blinking in the dark. "It's my home. It's where I came from. I can't just forget that." "Then don't," she says promptly, as though it's really that simple. "Do you know how many packmates have gone and died on me? My mother, the elders? Do you think I've forgotten them, just because I don't spend every day weeping into my paws? No? Well then." He falls silent, choked with memory. He knows what she's saying. She's telling him to move on, but he's not sure he can. She whuffs, and leans over to tuck her head into the fur of his neck, plainly settling in for the night. "No sense howling to something that won't howl back," she says, quoting an old proverb that has never before hit him like it does now. "Speak to the living, once in a while. You might enjoy it." The whole way back, her words spin around and around between his ears, echoing in the space between his heartbeats. It hurts. But there's a cleanness to the pain that feels almost healing, somehow. Grief wells thick and fresh in his throat, bubbling like an unvoiced wail, but that feels clean too. Finally they draw back to the rainforest, all shade and colour and thick, humid air. It's familiar to him, now. Does that make it home? Is home merely the place you live, where you mark, where your scent has lingered long enough to bring some comfort when you breathe? Isn't there more to it than that? Tot clearly doesn't think so. She lifts her head for a high, ululating cry as they draw near; in the distance, the voices of the pack rise in answer. They're familiar, each and every one. For a moment, it feels hard to breathe. The proverb echoes again and again in his head. No sense howling to something that'll never answer. Stop chasing your sorrows, she'd said. Speak to the living. His voice feels tentative when he lifts it, but it rings out as clear as it ever did. He's only howled in the tundra, these past years; calling for a home that will never call back. When the pack's tones shift around his own, it makes his fur prickle, something between alarm and instinctive delight fulminating beneath his skin. He's not used to it, anymore. He's only used to silence. It's not the home he lost. It can never replace what he lost. That much will never change, and he knows it. But, for the first time, he allows himself to hope that someday, it might be…if not perfect…then merely enough. Hiraeth howls, and his packmates howl back. --- He joins the hunting party. They welcome him as though this was where he was always meant to be. |
Zea #27549 |
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Posted 2021-08-07 04:52:20 (edited)
He snaps awake so fast it feels like being drenched in ice-melt. Except, 'awake' isn't quite the right word, is it? The world is full of light and lunar essence. The lichens glow, the vines luminesce, and the butterflies flit past on wings that leave trails of shining glitter in their wake. He tastes moondust on the wind. He's here, the not-rainforest, his pack's lands drenched in the matter of dreams – he's back, not in the north of his birthland perhaps, but here, really here, after so long. He surprises himself with a pang of regret. A moment later, he surprises himself with realisation instead. It's hard to tell, at first. These lands have always been made of thought and mystery, as mutable as dreams themselves. But… Slowly, solemnly, Hiraeth noses at a nearby leaf, and it doesn't feel right. It swims at the edges in a way that his body does not. He's too solid. Too much a wolf of mortal flesh. Why, he wonders, standing up, lifting his nose to the butterflies that he can't quite touch. Why now? Why like this? Why only a dream, when he has spent so very long chasing the real thing? He doesn't understand. Not until he turns his head to see behind him, and stops short. Oh. His friend is sleeping nearby, curled up, nose tucked under her tail. Moondust has settled on her fur as though sinking into it, and there is a luminescence trailing from the wispy patterns her too-long tail makes in the lunar essence. He has never seen her like this before, and yet he knows her almost better than his own reflection. This is Tot, his dearest friend, who he has hunted with for all these years. His friend, who has told him her secret name. His friend, whom he has given his own. His heart aches with a stirring of grief. Slowly, he pads forwards, and noses at the fur of her neck. She stirs, and wakes slowly. Her eyes open confusedly, blinking at him with a shine that was never there before. Already, she seems otherworldly. Already, she is less flesh than him. "Misty…?" she murmurs to him, bewildered, as confused as anyone abruptly woken from a deep dream. But she will never dream again, will she? He licks her on the snout, sad but resolute. "Come with me," he says, breathing the light in her fur. "There's somewhere you need to go." Slowly, she stands. Slowly, she looks around. And, finally, she begins to understand. "Oh," she utters, looking at herself in the reflection of a glittering, gleaming tree. Perhaps she sees the way her eyes are sparking, the way the edges of her are flickering into the air like a memory of flame. "Oh." He presses his shoulder to her, pelt to glittering pelt. "Come with me," he repeats, softly, and nudges her onwards. Finally, she dips her head at him, and goes. It should be a long way to the tundra. That was something he had never quite grown used to, in the waking world; distance there is heavy, and painful, and so terribly weighted by the passage of time. It's not like that here. Here, he knows how to slip between the creases of the world, to pass from edge to edge in the space of a single step. Time passes, and yet it doesn't. And, finally, he lifts his head to a familiar sky. He lingers there on the edge of the tundra, unwilling to go further. He wants to. Oh, he wants to. But.. "This is it, then?" she says, looking up with him. The aurora spills out around them, closer to the earth than it would ever come to mortal wolves. It reacts to her as one who belongs here, who will stay here, who is of the fabric of the world and shall never leave. Light whispers around her like the solar winds themselves. "This is where you came from? This is what you were searching for?" "These are the Dreamlands." He nods his head, by way of agreement. She stares at the sky. The radiance reflects in her eyes, glittering in a thousand colours. "It's beautiful." It is. He has longed to see it again, these long years. It's everything he remembered, and yet still beyond his reach. It always will be, won't it? "You should go," he tells her, heart aching all the more for how perfect she looks here. Her head swings round to look at him, and he speaks again. "There are wolves here. Tell them my name; they'll welcome you, I'm sure of it." Slowly, solemnly, she blinks at him. "You're not coming?" "I can't." The truth of it sinks to his bones, and he feels so very heavy. He can tell, with a certainty rooted in his soul: he doesn't belong here. Not anymore. The Dreamlands are a place living wolves can visit, if they're lucky. A place where living wolves can be born. But others yet will go there in their deathly dreams, and there they will stay. She is a part of this place, now; he is yet flesh and bone. As though pulled, her head turns northward. Perhaps she feels the unearthly gravity of it: calling, calling, all through the air and earth and stars. He remembers how it felt to run here, the substance of dreams coursing through you, the world parting and spilling around your paws. He can't imagine how she is still standing here, resisting that pull. And yet, she hesitates. Her head turns slowly, inexorably, back towards him. "I know it's time," she says, quiet, and in her eyes he sees the edge of grief he has carried all these years. She, now, has lost her home too. "But, somehow, I thought I would have longer." "I know." He presses his nose into her fur. It might well be the last time he scents her. "I'm sorry." She sighs, closing her eyes. "You were braver than I ever knew," she reminisces, fur spilling and spiralling around her on the eddies of thought. "Leaving home behind…it's no easy thing." "You'll make a new home," he tells her, heart welling with an emotion beyond description. "Only give it time. You'll see." Her eyes open and stare into his own. There is a ghostly point of light within each of them, glimmering like a star. "Did you, Hiraeth?" His fur prickles with emotion. How long was the road he walked, to lead him to this moment? How long had he waited to be able to answer that question truly? Finally, finally, he utters it: "I did," he says, quiet and trembling. "I did." She nods once, then looks north. On the horizon the Moon is glimmering like the light in her eyes. "Good," she speaks, voice distant. "I'm…glad." Silent, he nuzzles her one last time, then steps away. She's being called; she has to go. Still, she hesitates. Her head turns his way a final time. "You'll be okay, won't you? All of you." "I'll look after them," he promises, with all the truth in his heart. "You can go. It's alright." She nods. She looks away. Something shivers through her, the ephemeral fur rising and spiralling along her spine. For a moment, her eyes are alight, and her fur holds the Moon itself; she is elemental, with all the substance of the dreaming weaving her together. And then she lets go. Hiraeth watches her as she slips between thought and dream, a wolf-shaped phantom of shining light. He can see her running, in a way disconnected from true sight; she is so very, very far away already, she is lifting her head, she is howling. He can almost hear it. He can almost hear the voices calling back. Hiraeth closes his eyes and lays down. Soon, the Dreamlands will fall away, and he will awaken. It's for the best, he thinks. This place is not for him. It was, once. But no more. It's time to go home. Illustration by hydde 
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Zea #27549 |
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Posted 2021-08-31 09:02:41
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Anna #43986 |
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Posted 2021-08-31 19:04:55
And he was so young too 
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Zea #27549 |
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Posted 2021-09-01 12:31:19
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Anna #43986 |
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Posted 2021-09-01 12:41:12
I changed the title though so other people don't stumble upon this post only to be disappointed |
Zea #27549 |