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 Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 3:14 pm
Location: Timekeepers
Timeline: Current, end of summer (Day after Until Proven Guilty)
Thunder.
By the time she had found Iver, its crashes had become defeaning. The thoughts of others were drowned, her own thoughts were strangled, and the Timekeepers was victim to an onslaught of rain.
Again, the sky echoed.
The fur on Uuni's spine rose and she shivered, eyes snapping open, nose assaulted by a matting mess of fur. Twisting her head away from the damp earth, Uuni blinked into an unblemished sky. Squinting further, she could make out the sharp lines of sun grasping around the sides of a shadowed, rocky spire. This time, her whole body shivered.
Uuni enjoyed making a sport out of rising first. She would be loud, kick Iver as she stretched, and then refuse to rise. This morning, the harassment seemed stale, so she drew one careful leg back at a time until all four were tucked underneath her. Uuni let out a slow, concerned breath, and then wobbled slowly onto her feet.
One step. Pause. Still quiet. Uuni let her mental block fall, allowing the waking chatter to whisper in. Had she disturbed him? A second step put her out of immediate physical range and Uuni briskened her stride. He'd likely be awake by the time she reached the sunlight.
Please tell Iver that when you can.
More Sunlords females, wide-eyed, grasping for attention and freedom was the last thing Uuni wanted. They were more likely to get run over than have any real foundation for success, or they would attach themselves to a masculine figure in their own fear and be swept into the very inequality they were desperate to escape. Uuni did not miss the idle competitions, chatter about who was the best hunter. Outwardly, Uuni's ears had gone flat in annoyance.
She could just not tell him, but the backlash would be extreme. Rayner, she was sure, would voice disappointment, a crippling blow for Iver's self-esteem, despite his boisterous, outward physical claim to having a limitless supply.
The sun hit her face and Uuni let out a mouthful of mist. "********, it's cold," she snapped, teeth clicking together and dew-damp fur ruffing as she shook herself. Though she had her mind open, waiting for Iver's conscious thought cue her that he'd awakened, Uuni strained a look over her shoulder to where she'd left him.
Grey stone sloped downwards between them, darkened and slippery with moisture. Further still, the mountaintop formed a bowl. She could make out a small melt-water pond from here, a few early risers poking along its edge. You couldn't have fed her a moose to get her down in that shady, freezing hellhole. The pond's corners had probably iced over in the night.
While she waited--and it would likely be only moments now--she focused on the paler of the two. Females, Iver said, would be easier to relate to and so Uuni should practice entering their minds. It was for this exact reason Uuni always chose to focus on the males. What was he thinking? Why was he up? If he was weak of mind, she could lose herself in his thoughts. Wolves like Rayner, however, were like the lake in the winter--superficially rigid and impenetrable.
And oh how she wished she could be in his mind. How fascinating, to find out what he thought, how he operated, what emotions she triggered when she talked back at him. How delightful to watch his face falter.
Iver would find Uuni in a particularly good mood.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 3:58 pm
He'd no plans to physically pursue Uuni last night or most nights before then, but when she came to him with that look, what was he to do? By all public accounts, they were mates; it wasn't going to become a thing of scandal or legend they should act like it.
When she shut her mouth — and to be clear, it was that Uuni was annoying, not that she was female that bothered him — she was alluring in her own way: sturdy frame, ornate markings, everything that made the Sunlords' females such a lusted after commodity.
Yet for all their, ahem, private meetings, he had no heir to show for it, and so the act became something of shame. He couldn't pretend his lack of offspring was due to them not trying after they'd technically done the deed, with or without that specific intent.
I should agree to it, was his first coherent thought that morning.
Unbeknownst to Uuni, Iver already knew the talk of the pack. Rayner wasn't delegated authority on behalf of them all, nor was he sent to act as some messenger for the downtrodden masses. These were Timekeeper wolves — the strong, the brave, the obnoxiously loud with two complaints for every opinion they couldn't wait to share.
When he rolled over and stretched his weary muscles, Iver could already sense the tension and excitement in the air. What he saw, though, was only her. It was at a leisurely pace he did so, but he made his way outside and, as usual, business was the first order in and of itself. "I've had a request to go to the Sunlords. We need more females."
And more slaves, he groused, but he wasn't quite ready to crack open that wasp west.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 4:14 pm
Completely lacking magical ability, powered only by natural, idle chatter, Iver already made a better seer than Uuni. His voice and the scents of the real world caught Uuni off-guard, and she wobbled and swayed, suddenly surprised to find rock beneath her feet instead of grass.
She shook her head, planting all four feet against stone. Uuni needn't look at him to hear him and so she didn't, a trait which bothered both Sunlord and Timekeeper alike.
"That reminds me, Rayner says we need more females." Uuni drew out the facetious statement along her tongue, sounding bored and disinterested. Females she repeated in her head.
"Some males would be nice, too," she finished casually. The paler of the two wolves she was watching vanished behind a line of trees.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 4:39 pm
Life would be easier if Iver had waited his turn to be born. Uuni would have been rendered obsolete in his life as a mate and a prophet. He'd had the potential to be a budding seer himself once, according to rumor.
While his mother spoke of female wiles, his father harped on the importance of keeping in line. "He stares too much," was the first complaint he remembered. "He looks look those seer types when they go prowling around in your head." There was another after that, he had no doubt.
Two complaints for every opinion, the Timekeeper way. His father lived off water, air, meat, and judgements. Squashing potential that didn't quite fit with what he thought his pups should be was a special talent of his.
May he feed what crawls in the dirt for years to come, Iver thought idly.
"The last time we were there, we offered the males safe passage here if they could hunt down a deer we decided on in advance." He slid his front paws in front of him and leaned back. Pop, pop, pop from his joints and spine. "They couldn't... And the deer was dead." From the corner of her eye, she'd see him smirk.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 4:57 pm
If there ever existed a wolf in the sky, Uuni looked to him now. A Sharanjin swear twittered free of her mouth, hastily cast towards the ground.
More loudly, she expressed her lack of amusement to Iver. "That one is terrible, even by your standards." Uuni wasn't referring to its lack of political correctness.
"So, are you sending our resident brown-noser?"
If it was one thing Rayner had, it was the ability to crawl around ranks. The pampered words he'd fed her yesterday still rang in her ears. Not everyone wants something from you here. Bullshit. Yet, sometimes she wondered if it wasn't. Bullshit she repeated firmly in her own mind. The more she said it, the better she felt.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 5:23 pm
Iver was known to become nettlesome when confronted with that name. Already he raised his hackles, curled his lip to show some teeth. Rayner was more rotten than even his father -- as a corpse. I wouldn't send that lying traitor to negotiate with that dead deer. He'd blackmailed his own son, for starters. It topped the list of offenses, but his crimes and act of hubris were many. "He's a Warden, not an Ambassador," Iver reminded her, in case she hadn't heard his thoughts. "I'll send Ellisif... and I'll be going myself."
He tried not to think of the underlined implications of that for both their sakes. It didn't entirely work. If she was eavesdropping on the mental front, she'd already know why. And why he looked out at the nearby copse of trees, suddenly fixated on them.
I should find someone else while I'm there if she can't make heirs.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 6:34 pm
Iver's eyes moved to the trees, Uuni's shifted to the ridgeline. Cold winters. Long, thunderclapped summers. Iver's hot breath on her neck, year after year.
Perhaps she had not heard the harsh mental realities, but she knew. Like Iver, she could listen between the pack's dissimulated chatter. They watched her as she moved, casually inquired as to her health. They were disappointed in Timekeeper and mate. And he, in turn, was disappointed in her--her powers remained rampant and unchained, useless and flat as her belly. At her most irrational, she convinced herself she could, and was, physically suppressing her body.
Twelve more seasons. This is what old age offered her.
A single puppy could shorten that life to two. Should she live through it, what little freedom she grasped desperately for would disappear. That mangy, demanding puppy would become her life.
He cannot fault me for trying, her drunken mind slurred as she looked towards him. The word try was always found paired with the word fail. Fail to read Rayner's mind. Failed to see a vision of Iver's past. Failed to witness a vision of their future together; perhaps there was not one.
"Well." The sardonic tone she'd attempted cracked, and fell defeated at the point of the brown shoulder on which she was focusing. "Make sure she's pretty. I'd like something to look at for my troubles." It felt raw. She felt raw.
No doubt he would find someone suitable. And, then, what? Would she become a source of shame, only spoken of when one wanted to take a jab at the Timekeeper over a meal? As a seer, she was bound to his side, so it was doubtful she would suffer the grievances of starvation or torture. But, to be pitied seemed a longer and more intense pain.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 7:04 pm
Expletives was all the most proficient seer to ever live would have garnered from him after that. He thought the majority of them, murmured one or two aloud, then turned to her, all the way around, until she was in the center of all he could see. Right now, he wished that was the case in a metaphorical sense.
Challenging didn't begin to describe living with someone who was free to make incursions on one's mind as a passing fancy. He tried to block her out, and when that didn't work, tried not to think things best unheard. But a wolf could not control his thoughts any easier than his heartbeat.
Was that alone to blame?
"Uuni -- " He almost corrected himself. Almost called her that. It was on the tip of his tongue, so close to audible he could hear himself saying it: I didn't mean it, Aksaya.
Feeling sorry you were, in fact, not sorry... Was that good enough?
He stood with his tail drooped low, his ears rotating back and forth, up and down. An expression once pensive favored a perhaps infuriatingly calm melancholy.
"You can't blame me for this," Iver said quietly, as though they were negotiating.
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Posted: Sun Sep 14, 2014 7:31 pm
Finding her jaw loose, Uuni pushed her tongue into the ridges along her mouth. Her eyes wandered from rotating ears, to the nervous curl of his tail. In shared empathy, her own moved behind her, but out of pure stubbornness she refused to let it curl underneath and touch her belly.
A snort pushed through her nostrils and her eyes dropped. Was he implying that he blamed her? That things were out of both of their control and he blamed neither? He would blame someone, or the pack would force him. Did she think he wanted to put this burden on her shoulders? Hardly. But, would he use her as a scapegoat if he had to? Absolutely.
He's the one obsessed with bloodlines. It would be so easy to point out all the terrible flaws in picking on blood; flaws the Sunlords shared. She believed Iver a pack's tool for buying into it, same as her mother was a treaty's tool for believing her daughter could be happy here. Life was not a happy place. That was why, despite evidence to the contrary, Iver felt he needed an heir. That was why, despite not having done anything but been born, puppies were slaves. And it was why, despite priding themselves in maintaining a sacred balance so the sun continued to rise, the Sunlords had to sell their own bitches to stay alive through the winter. And finally, it was why, despite loathing almost every moment of being a mate and shriveling inside at the idea of having offspring, Uuni was terrified of a reality in which one ended and the other never came to be.
Uuni swallowed down the arguments, the desire to angrily tell him to change the way things were--didn't he have the power? Wasn't he in charge?--and changed the subject. "Who do I have to listen to while you're away?"
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Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:13 pm
As always, change didn't come that easy. Iver ignored her question and willed himself not to blink. "We need one, Uuni, or things will stay the same." Something he'd thought a hundred times and meant to say a thousand more. He didn't mean we in the context of his and hers heirs. He meant we, the pack. We, the Timekeepers. We, those with any hope of a different future.
He'd seen the way she looked at the slaves, the way some others did. They were the minority now, but the next generation... Maybe if they got to them young. Maybe if the next leader was taught these ideals from the start, nurtured with them in ways his own father hadn't done with him.
"I know you want things to be different," he went on. "But you — we. We are not going to win this. We aren't. My mother, Blasa, Amery... They're all against us if we try. And without a son or a daughter of mine... When I die, it would probably be Amery to take my place. Worse, Rayner would find a way. What change will happen then?" He breathed deep and sighed out the final words, at last averting his eyes from her. "This isn't about us."
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Posted: Thu Sep 18, 2014 1:58 pm
It was hard to argue with reason. On principle, the future didn't affect her. A dead body didn't care about slaves or power or change.
Unfortunately, Iver cared about the future. Iver was a part of her present life. The slaves were also a part of the present life, and loathe as she was to admit it, Uuni wanted to be able to look back at them and think I'm trying.
"Well, ******** them." Even Iver's mother, who Uuni both liked and respected on her own time, would not escape her virulent criticisms.
But Iver was right. Uuni could wail, scream, criticize, and rebel until her heart stopped, but the Timekeepers were thick-headed and stubborn. They were more resistant to change than a Sunlord shaman.
"I'm sure there will be someone desperate enough to hump your heels." Her shoulders rolled as she moved into a stretch, ears flicking back once in mock apathy. "I'm fine," she finished with, as though suddenly realizing that clearly guilty look was on her behalf. "And I will be fine. Just don't be stupid about who you bring home." She could have been his mother with a tone like that.
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