Rikyn

Someone is coming, of which I receive two warnings.

One, perhaps the most obvious, is the change within the strands that bind my buck and I. His uneasiness, almost always immediately born in the presence of others, rattles up and down that invisible thread, drawing my morose gaze from the misty swirl of the Edge, and into the wood. I don’t see anything, but I hear someone moving around nearby. It could just be a family of rabbits, or a flock of crows alighting; even if it was a person, they would likely go out of their way to avoid me, taking a long arc where a straight line might have sufficed.

“Rikyn?” asks the trees behind me. I sigh, forfeiting all thoughts of rabbits, and strangers going out of their way to remain that way, and look over my shoulder at her as she comes to stand alongside me.

"Tiamat," I try to answer with some warmth. My lips even meekly curl upwards, one side, anyway…

Familiar and recognizable as all get out, Tiamat of the North is as blue and pretty as she’d been when we’d met last. Though the trees here are much smaller, the hot radiance of the blue magma is perhaps relatable to the sweltering heat of this summer. I glance alongside her at the floating whale with some measure of curious surprise, which fleetingly overrides my need to be grumpy.

What the fuck is that?

Her nose is presented to me; her sweet, mountain grass kiss waits, almost drowns out the last embers with the promise of sharing breath. With more hesitation than I had displayed last time we’d greeted one another, my ears tilt back ever so slightly as I grab hold of my anger and tell it to behave (it wouldn’t do to impulsively bite her nose, would it?). She hadn’t done anything to me but call me her friend.

As it often does, that word attempts to latch itself into the inside of my chest, and not let go. It’s a weird sort of warmth to rise alongside annoyance and aggression, just as the smell of her weaving through my senses does not coincide well with the desire to make things bleed. When I pull away from our fleeting, primal embrace, a snort sounds on the air, all my feelings wadded up into a gust of air and expelled, lions tail irritably curling up against my opposite side. Her words don’t help.

Her easy laughter is so unlike the tight knots bound inside me. They tighten when she casually assumes it is my home still, her question about how I’ve been making them groan with the pressure they apply to their twisting.

"I don’t live there any longer," I tell her. I don’t. Even if my heart is still lying on the floor of some cavern somewhere within, I dramatically think to myself. Duir, still hiding somewhere in the woods, gains an air of concern for the woman beside me as my emotions continue to rush up and down wildly. I might shout at him that I’m not a barbarian, just emotional, if I wasn’t sure he’d ignore me for another two weeks to remind me of how I’d kicked an old man to oblivion and back, or if I also was sure Tiamat wouldn’t think I was insanely yelling at trees. The realization I’m frowning is covered up with a meager smile, not really wanting to reveal to the cheerful woman that my heart is ravaged and, quite possibly, on fire. "I haven’t for almost a year now."

"I’ve been okay though," I lie, for the first time in my life not taking the extra reach to brag about battling legendary warriors, or having become stronger than the young boy on patrol she’d met all those whiles ago. That’s too much for today, mostly because I lost every fight worth winning, and I now patrolled, well, nothing, because my life was aimless. So, instead, I redirect the conversation to her, to her sunlight soul, and what she must think of with joy, floating oddly in the air alongside her (I’ve only seen part of one whale, and it was much bigger, and in the ocean, swimming). It’s likely that curiosity and lack of understanding is obvious in both my tone and on my face, even before I ask her about it directly. "You have bonded, I see, though I can’t say I’ve ever seen a flying whale before."

I almost ask for his, her, its name until I discover that conundrum. The air about the thing smells like lake and fish, the gender indiscernible under all that smell by nose alone. Not being a nautical scientist, I haven’t a single clue how to know whether this is a dude whale or a lady whale, and I definitely know better than to assume those things… even if Tiamat seems far less likely to stab me than most.

[ OOC: Of course not! I love Tia <3 plus he needs some of her easy going happy in his life as you can see. ;D ]