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 Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:38 am
((To keep things moving, I'll be lax about posting order in here. For purposes of plot later, we'll assume that everyone is here unless you specify otherwise -- Kami, Kai, Chou, Marion, Mars, and Mercury)) Despite himself, Kai was excited.
He didn't want to be. He had no intention of ever coming home after he'd first left these golden beaches...but, now that he was nearly there, he couldn't help but feel his heart thud up into his chest with anticipation. It felt good to come home, that was the length and breadth of it. Wander as far as you wanted, your paws always knew their way back to their homeland.
And what a homeland it was!
All day they had journeyed through the semi-tropical plants that rimmed the cliffs that marked Kapu'Moana's outer boundary. The undergrowth was lush and bright, early summer light filtering down in golden beams, and everything seemed warm and glowing.
Even the company seemed pleasant today. He had often been curious about Kamiya's choice of traveling companions, but today he thought they were a fine group of wolves.
Of course, all of this would collapse as soon as he caught the first sight of his packmates. Or, gods help him, his father.
But he didn't want to think about that right now. Instead he would focus on the lovely weather and their oddly good fortune in not yet having run across the border guard.
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Posted: Wed Jul 06, 2011 1:49 am
 Kamiya was a complicated mess of emotions.
On the one paw, she was elated. She was going home. She was going to be rid of this whole crazy, ridiculous world very, very soon. She was going to turn Kai over to the proper authorities, and then she might get a nice promotion.
On the other paw, she was terrified. She didn't know what was waiting for her on the other side of the cliff they were cresting. She wasn't sure how the others would react when she told them she wanted to part ways -- permanently.
And, more than that...arching over everything...was the secret she was keeping.
It was bittersweet. Ironic, even, considering the conversation she'd had with Chou not so long ago. She hadn't known, then, that she was pregnant...but she'd discovered it soon after, and was working hard to conceal the fact from the others. The last thing she wanted was to field their questions. If she just got home and left them all, she could sort this out in privacy. Depending how the offspring looked, they might even be able to secure a fine rank for themselves.
At least she knew whose they were. Or at least she was fairly certain.
Not that she let anyone else know about any this, of course. To everyone else, she was her same cold, aloof quasi-leader she had been from the beginning. And she intended to keep it that way.
The closer she got to the heart of the territory, though, the more uneasy she began to feel. They should have run across the guards by now. And there was an odd scent that lingered -- one she didn't recognize but which caused her belly to wrench uncomfortably.
....Or perhaps that was the pups.
......pups. Oh, gods, what was she playing at.
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Posted: Fri Jul 08, 2011 5:44 pm
 There was a sense of familiarity here for Chou. Bright flowers, beaches, a sense of purpose wrapping around them . . . Not quite like Setsuri, but it triggered memories. Fruit served to the upper class, pups corralled by mentors, a sharp bark or two to resolve a drowsy contingent to soldier-worthy awareness -
- a border patrol greeting him between missions.
That alone made the usually suspicious Chou even moreso. The scents weren't fresh here; no sounds of pawsteps, no new pawprints.
He half expected them to be ambushed in the silence, and prepared accordingly, slowing down subtly to place himself behind the prince. Chou's long ears remained alert for an odd noise.
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Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2011 8:17 pm
 In her own way, Marion too was on high alert. Or, depending on how you wanted to classify things, just plain overstimulated. Changes in topography tended to do that to her, and alien flora - if something was new, well. It demanded attention in a way that was impossible to ignore.
So, the bearish wolf was doing her best not to rampage into the midst of an unfriendly pack, which, if you had not spent much time around her, looked a great deal like rampaging into the midst of an unfriendly pack.
People tended to underestimate Marion, in lots of ways.
She was reining herself in, keeping close to the others, and even keeping an eye on Kamiya and Kai when she could bear to tear her nose away from the strange loose earth beneath her paws. Like a giant river, they had said, and it seemed it went along with a vast expanse of riverbank. "You could dig a crater," she whispered fervently, trying to keep her elation more or less to herself.
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Posted: Sat Jul 09, 2011 10:18 pm
"You could," Kai replied, mildly. He had remained consistently neutral toward Marion for most of the journey. Though she was hardly his favorite wolf in the world, she also was not the most terrifying or frustrating he had ever met, and his patience seemed nearly endless, perhaps because he himself was such an idiot about so many things. "But it would fill right back up. You have to get the sand wet or else it won't hold its shape at all."
Sand, really? They were talking about sand?
Kami resisted the urge to whirl around and slap them both.
Pregnancy hormones? Maybe. How ridiculous was this. She kept idly hoping that if she pretended she wasn't pregnant, that the pups would just quietly disappear and she could carry on with life as planned...but so far she wasn't sure it'd work. Also, she couldn't seem to stop thinking about them. They kept stealing into her thoughts at inappropriate times.
Like now.
Back to sand.
She fell back in step beside Chou, and spoke in a low voice. "There's something wrong," she said, hoping she was speaking quietly enough that the others -- absorbed as they were in discussion of sand -- wouldn't hear. "We should have been accosted by the guards by now. Keep an ear out."
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Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2011 1:39 pm
"I'm aware." As if in salute, the ear closest to Kami turned towards her, then flattened back to Chou's skull.
He flipped through possible scenarios. A war? But he couldn't smell blood outright. Deportation? After all, Chou was not sure if a stronger pack lay nearby. Humans? Bears? Disease, famine, natural disaster?
As much as Chou perpetuated silence himself, he hated it otherwise.
"Should I scout ahead for you?" he murmured to her as Marion conversed with the prince.
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 5:00 pm
"Yeah, okay," she drawled, passing Kai a disturbingly canny look, before churning forward in a sudden sprint, sending jets of sand up in her wake. It would be difficult as hell to run something down here - and what could you eat here, anyway? Sand-eating deer? Loping around, she eyeballed Kamiya and Chou, and wondered what cause they had for speaking so secretively. Her hackles raised as she pondered, and began coursing slowly around the group, like a solitary shark.
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 5:19 pm
Kami winced.
The pups she carried in her belly writhed around, perhaps in hunger, or picking up on their mother's agitation. She had done a good job of concealing her weight gain until now (being small-statured and generally muscular seemed to help), but she was getting dangerously close to term.
A week, maybe. The others had probably even noticed by now and hadn't brought it up. Chou, at least, probably had.
"Yes," Kami said, after a moment's hesitation. "That...would probably be a good idea."
She needn't have bothered, however. As Marion plunged ahead, past a rocky outcropping that marked the entrance to the "inner sanctum" of the pack, the bear-pelted wolf was apt to run face-first into a pile of bodies.
They were all in varying stages of dismemberment and consumption, as though all had been nibbled on at least a little before being drug into a tidy stack. There were at least a dozen of them, all brightly-colored, the bottom tier sodden from the lapping of waves.
The smell, too, would assault their senses if the winds were to change.
From where Kami and Kai stood, they could see nothing...but they would be in for a nasty shock when they caught up with Marion.
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Posted: Sun Jul 17, 2011 5:34 pm
As her shark-circle brought her even with the outcropping, Marion slowed, then stopped. She was, unprecedentedly, still and silent, as she needed to focus all of her thought on the ghastly spectacle before her. Revulsion pricked at her throat, but as it passed she found she was still intensely curious, and marvelously unfrightened by whatever terror-beasts were responsible for this massacre. Still, she stayed where she was, opting for a Taoist plan of action until Kami gave her some clue as to what was going on.
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Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2011 1:24 pm
Sometimes Chou marveled at Marion's impetuosity. If he had simply gone ahead without alerting his captain, regardless of his finds he would be punished for "disregarding the chain of command", or something to that effect.
But the stillness and unnatural silence, the lack of patrol or sound of pawsteps beyond their own . . . Even if Kami had not agreed to scout ahead, he would have at least jogged slightly ahead, behind Marion; thus, he did.
Though Marion was still first to see the bodies. Chou caught the faint scent of something foul mere seconds before the wind turned towards him, Kai, and Kami - and his hackles rose. He was surprised (and perhaps even annoyed) that Marion had not alerted them upon first sight: the ritualistic piling and various states of decomposition or consumption was . . . disturbing at the very least.
Chou had seen many things in his short career in Setsurei, but not quite to this degree of violence.
He flagged his tail for the prince and their pseudo-leader to see, ears flat against his skull. "Murder," he growled softly, though perhaps the wind would carry the word to them.
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Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2011 10:22 pm
Kami passed the barrier first, just in time to catch the end of Chou's words. Her eyes widened and her body stiffened, a shudder rolling down her spine as her hackles raised, her tail standing out straight behind her. She found that she couldn't move, as though her paws had been cemented into the sand.
"No..." she said, her voice a low growl. "Not murder. Slaughter."
She had never seen anything like it in her life, and she could hardly believe she was seeing it now. She took one struggling step forward and nearly collapsed with the effort of moving. She was shaking all over -- from fear, or rage, or disbelief, or a mixture of all three.
"What's all this, then?" Kai asked, pushing past the small circular crowd that had gathered, trying to get a good view.
He let out a low whine and stumbled forward. He nearly smashed into Kamiya, bounced off, and made his way to the pile of gnawed-upon remains unsteadily, weaving as though drunk. He recognized so many faces. There was the servant who brought him his dinner. There was the head of the royal guard.
And there was -- "....Mom?"
Tears caught in his eyes and he suddenly veered away to vomit behind a rock.
Kami didn't throw up or cry, however. A cold look of fury suddenly caught in her eyes and she walked swiftly and stiff-leggedly past the pile of bodies and up toward the heart of the territory, with little regard of those in her wake.
It was worse, here. The territory was stained here and there with blood. Everywhere were signs of struggle -- broken undergrowth, overturned rocks, deep divets in the sand. No more bodies, though...at least, not until she reached the highest point among the beachside cliffs where the dens were made. There, outside the alpha's den, was....what was left of the alpha.
He looked remarkably like Kai: the same blue fur, the same marks about the eyes. A wide patch of white spread up the bridge of his nose; otherwise, they could have been identical. His head had been set, profanely, on top of a stack stones outside the den.
The rest of his body was nowhere to be seen.
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Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 9:46 am
With her deep brows furrowed in consternation, Marion trailed after Kami, her main motivation being to put some distance between herself and the retching prince. Watching a stranger's life fall into hell might interest her under other circumstances, but Kamiya was a friend, as grudging and one-sided as the relationship might be (the thought tickled at her, and she grew briefly suspicious, but she put it aside for an idle day). Even she was not quite crass enough to be boisterous and self-interested in this sort of situation. As Kamiya stalked into the heart of the territory, Marion made a circuit of the blood-stained earth, and then back to the bodies. She glanced at Chou - normally an enemy, the constant irritation in his gaze a quiet threat, a near challenge - to see what the male had made of this: two wolves, just two wolves, their scent and saliva thumbprinted over every nibbled carcass.
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Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 11:58 am
Marion's look was a glance indeed - while she trailed after Kami to yet another grisly find, Chou stayed behind with the sickened prince. Bright eyes darted from dune to dune, to the edge of the trees closest to them, to the path they had carved; al the while his ears turned this way and that, straining for something out of the ordinary beyond the sacrificial pile.
The sound of Kailani's retching made him swallow his own bile down. He approached once both their stomachs had settled. "I need you to think, Kai-dono," he said, speaking quickly. "I need you to tell me if the pack had any enemies, if there had been any threats - anything of that nature."
Yes, he had managed to note that evidence pointed to the work of two wolves. No, he did not think this was a good time to mention that.
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Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2011 8:29 pm
Kamiya was dimly aware of Marion's arrival and then departure, but she made no motion to follow. She settled heavily upon her haunches, staring at the head. She couldn't blink or look away. Her thoughts had become a white blanket, a self defense mechanism that rescued her for insanity.
Until the pups moved in her belly.
Awoken from her reverie, tears burst into her eyes. All of a sudden, everything crashed into her consciousness at once, and apart from the blank whiteness her thoughts now where complete jumbled hysteria. She let out a strangled desperate scream and tore herself away, half-stumbling back down the well-worn cliff face she had climbed so many times in her life. She wanted to kill something. She wanted to fight someone, about what had happened here. She wanted to do anything to make this awful feeling do something more than roll around miserably in her gut.
Kai retched until there was nothing left, and then his stomach heaved a few more times for good measure. He stumbled away, his limbs shaking, and it took him a few minutes to understand that Chou was talking to him. His ears flicked back. "N-no," he said, shaking his head emphatically, maybe a little over-emphatically. "N-not that I know of...we...nobody really knows we're here."
That was one thing Kapu'Moana had always been: secretive. Part of the reason the center of their territory rested so far away from the outer border was so invaders could be dealt with long before they realized there was a pack living there.
But...who could possibly want to do...this? This wasn't any spur-of-the-moment violence. This was done with purpose. Revolution, maybe? His eyes darted rapidly over the stack of bodies, searching to see who might be missing, but it made him sick to look and so he looked away instead.
"We're the last ones," he said, trying to believe it. "If...if I hadn't left..."
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Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2011 3:07 pm
From a distance, Marion sat and watched Kami begin to weep. It made her restless, troubled, but she kept herself sitting. The cogs of her mind were grinding, trying to discover the inevitable advice she would dispense, but it was rare that Marion was ever confronted with a problem so fraught with emotion, and the bitter tears and screaming were throwing off her wheels and hawsers. Life is meaningless, she thought, and was briefly lifted into the clouds by the thought; her eyes went glassy and blank.
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