Post by Raul Adalwulf on Dec 1, 2020 0:45:00 GMT -5
The snow felt sharp against his skin. It was the only word for it. A warm summer breeze felt soft, round, like a blanket. Winter on the other hand felt hard, and pointy, like a knife or a spear, not that Raul minded much. He loved winter time.
If he'd been the kind of person to question his own feelings at all, Raul might have wondered why that was. He'd grown near the coast where the weather was much more temperate, and winters were mild at the worst, to the point that there was little distinction between the cool months and any of the others. Why he'd grown to like the cold and the snow was a mystery, especially given that his initial reaction to the sight of the plants shedding their foliage and the animals retreating from exposure had been one of remorse, and sadness, yet another strange thing to further his alienation and isolation from this unfamiliar land. At first he'd been hesitant, skeptical of the icy embrace of the season, and had spent many days indoors in an attempt to escape it, but eventually his need to run freely through the great outdoors which had always been his home had grown too strong to resist, and not even the threat of the chilled stranger of Winter could dissuade him.
That had been a few weeks ago, when he first ventured forth into the frigid, white blanketed expanses, and since then, he'd grown to love its whites and greys and the mournful moans of the winds as much as he ever had the greens and blues and merry birdsongs of summer. It was in a way, as if he'd been transported to a brand new world. If he looked really hard he could still find familiar details of the home he'd been exploring and discovering all summer long. A crooked tree here, a stream there, an abandoned animal den there, broad strokes still shining through like hard details behind a sheer veil, but so many things were transfigured beyond recognition that it made even the most familiar paths and trails seem brand new, and it rekindled in him that same joy he'd felt when he first explored them. It was like the season had given him the gift of countless new things to be discovered. It was like unwrapping a gigantic present, one square foot of flakey white wrapper at a time. In no time Raul had found himself following those old game trails, and discovering new trails made accessible by the sheets of settled snow creating a gentle slope where once had been a sheer cliff, or where the weight had downed a tree, or where the small streams had frozen over. It was magic. It was magical. It filled him with such true childish joy that sometimes it made his chest ache.
He found that the snow he'd distrusted at first, for being cold and wet, and unfamiliar, was now something he thought of with the same fondness he felt for his mother and father, as if it were a treasured companion that joined him through his journeys, always obscuring discoveries. Over time the chilly touch of the snows had become like a welcome embrace, a preposition to a promise of joyful exploration. Raul found that his body was remarkably well adapted to the rigors of the cold and resistant to the sapping of warmth. He found that his shaggy grey mane blended in terrifically with the shifting white, and the drifts obscured his scent, while the trails of the hares he loved to hunted stood out starkly in them. It was like discovering a part of himself he'd never suspected, but had always keenly noted the absence of.
By the moon and stars, he LOVED winter!
And to winter, like an old friend, a trusted confidant, he fled when he needed guidance.
Raul didn't know what had happened. Unlike most of his peers, he'd abstained from the festival. Raul disliked crowds. He found the chattering of hundreds of voices too overwhelming and distracting, and he especially disliked fireworks, with their loud unexpected bangs, and their flashing and shimmering, which made him want to run for cover whenever they went off. If he'd had somebody to go with, someone who he trusted, someone who could hold his hand like his mother had when the summer storms came, and rub his head, he could have maybe gone, but Raul didn't have anyone like that, and with the more time that yawned between him and a time when he had, the less he suspected he ever would again. So he hadn't gone. He'd spent that night in the woods, sleeping in a burrow beneath a willow tree.
When he returned to the academy the next day, he found out what had happened. Holly was gone...
That was all anyone would tell him, or close enough. Sometimes they said, "There was an accident", or "I'm sorry, Did you know her?", when they saw the look on his face and how his ears drooped, but most of them just said she was "gone", like not even they had any better an idea of what that meant that Raul did. Raul knew what that had meant. He'd been at Haven, and Sanctum before that, long enough to know what "gone" meant when someone said it with lowered eyes and a hitch in their throat.
Still, he'd gone looking for her, in his foolish ignorance, hoping that maybe they'd just lost her somewhere. He'd been to the spot in the quad where he met her that one time, where a little banana plant was starting to bravely grow out of the snow, and he'd been back every day ever since, just to make sure it was doing alright. He'd been to the garden set aside for her club, where they grew all sorts of tasty plants, but Raul hadn't felt like eating any of them, even though the tomatoes looked really plump and tasty, despite the fact that it was totally out of season for them, as if Holly had just been there to tend to them. He'd even followed the scent of her all the way from the garden back to a room on the second floor of the dorms where everything smelled like her, that same floral smell, not like perfume, but like flowers, with a hint of sadness beneath it. He spent a long time there, fooled by the strength of that scent into thinking she was there, even though he couldn't open the door, even though the door did not open no matter how much he shook it and whined. A girl in the room next door had come out with tears in his eyes and asked him to leave, more kindly that she probably wanted to. He must had looked like a lost puppy pining after an absent master.
You'd never have guessed he only met her the one time. You'd have thought they had been friends for years. But if you thought that, you didn't know Raul very well. Raul felt the loss keenly, and no less keenly simply because the person lost had only been in his life for a comparatively small time. She'd been sad, she'd been crying when he met Holly, but she'd still been kind to him. She'd cuddled him, and rubbed his head, and even though she'd been a bit odd, even to someone as strange as Raul, she'd treated him without any pretense, without any of the uncertainty or suspicion that everyone else seemed to regard him with, at least for a time. Not a week had gone by since, without him thinking about that peculiar encounter, and despite how odd it had felt at times, he still looked back fondly on it, as having made a friend, as having made someone happy, and he'd looked forward to seeing her again, and had smiled whenever they crossed paths. Even though he knew how scary his smiles made him look. And though there had never been a sequel to that episode in the quad, he'd looked forward to seeing her again, and maybe having his ears rubbed again and curling around her and making her smile again.
But now that wasn't going to happen. Holly was gone.
Suddenly those moments when he'd thought fondly of her, had looked forward to bumping into her again, seemed less joyful and more tragic, like moments wasted, moments that he'd never have back. Missed opportunities...
So he'd gone back to the only friend he had left. Kersch had been a waking nightmare, and though he'd formed strong bonds, it was all something he'd rather forget entirely, and he couldn't look at any of the others without feeling that shame, and terror he'd felt in those blasted out streets creeping back up on him. Holly was the only friend he'd made where the memory didn't fill him with fear or anger. Now all he had was the snow, and the wilderness. They would always be there, and one day he would give his body to them, and return to the soil where hopefully a nice tree or flower would grow. But the snow, and the wilds had no ears with which to listen to his grief, and they had no voice with which to give him answers to it. At least, when he laid down in the snow and felt the cold like a knife on his bare skin, at least then he could forget that pain. At least while he hunted through the drifts for hares, he could pretend for a moment that nothing else existed but himself and his prey.
The wolf in his blood didn't grieve. It didn't grieve for Holly, or the dozen of lives it had ended in Kersch.
It was a ritual he'd partaken in for that last few days, but today was different. Today someone else was out in the woods. The cold and snow usually kept most students, except for the ones from Atlas, inside, and they preferred the urban training biome as opposed to the woodlands which were Raul's specialty.
The first clue of the intrusion was shattered stump, which looked like it had been smashed open by a massive hammer. Raul had found a lump of twisted lead nearby, stinking of fire dust and still warm. It had been a few days since the last snowfall, and he area was pretty well tracked out, so it was useless to try and track footprints, until he happened upon fragments of glass crushed against a rock that smelled of sharp spirits. He followed the most likely set of footprints from the broken bottle, until he started to be able to pick up the sounds of combat. It had been faint even to his ears, and he'd followed for nearly fifteen minutes before finally laying eyes upon the intruder.
Despite himself, and despite the fact that these grounds were public facilities, Raul couldn't help but think of the other student as an intruder. The wolf in him felt protective and territorial over this little patch of artificial woodland, and viewed the senseless destruction ofit's trees and the soiling of it's slopes with litter as a capitol offence. The... whatever was in him other than wolf... was intrigued, curious of this intruder and their odd behavior. In his limited experience, people were mostly predictable. He didn't always understand why people did certain things, like why people always looked at him with suspicion and sometimes fear, (though after Kersch he was starting to understand that), but he was fairly good at recognizing patterns of behavior even if the motives remained obscured. And if he knew one thing, loudly smashing one's way through the woods and leaving a trail of ruin and broken bottles, (he'd found a couple more along the way after the first), was a decidedly abnormal behavior. On the one hand it made him cautious, because who knew what an unstable and unpredictable person with huntsman training might do if they saw his hulking seven foot tall lupine silhouette stalking through the woods behind them, but on the other hand he felt it would be irresponsible to just leave such a creature to their own devices. For a reason he couldn't have articulated in a million years, he felt like the person responsible was in trouble somehow, and needed help. What kind of help? Only the moon and stars could say, but their weren't here, they wouldn't be hear for a few more hours at least. Only Raul was here, and that made it his problem.
He rounded a bend in the trail, just as it broke from the cover of the treeline and ascended a small slope. Raul knew this spot. The slope lead up to a small cliff face that overlooked the training facilities. You could see some of the quad from up there, and Raul liked to go up there on sunny days after he'd caught a hare to enjoy his meal in the sun. It wasn't sunny today. It was somewhat overcast and would probably snow again at some point, but you could still see a lot of the training grounds from up there. Maybe that was why the intruder had come this way.
He could see them perched at the peak, looking out towards the academy. It was a girl, a small girl. It was surprising. Seeing the state of some of the poor trees left like broken toys in the trail of this trespasser, Raul had expected some hulking creature like himself, despite the fact that he'd been at Haven and around people with super-natural abilities long enough that he really should have known better. It seemed incongruent that such a small looking person, stuffed into her winter gear, could be responsible for such wrath as was demonstrated by her path of ruin.
Raul stood as straight as he could, despite the discomfort it caused for a spine and hips better arranged for quadrupedal locomotion. He didn't know why, but people tended to get upset or angry with him when he approached on all fours. The same people also tended to get mad at him when he bumped into things, which was unfair in his mind, as if they didn't know how hard it was for him to balance on two legs. The firs flake of the expected snowfall fell on his snout, and a longer than expected pink tongue flicked it off. More flakes fell soon after on the his chest and shoulders, bare save for a fine pelt of translucent grey fuzz. He approached cautiously, making much more noise than necessary by deliberately crunching through an undisturbed drift that came up the the mid thigh of his arctic camo cargo pants.
He could have approached more quietly, but that would only have been useful if he meant to pounce on the intruder. He wanted her to hear him coming. Strangers tended not to react kindly when unexpectedly encountering a seven foot tall half wild beastman, and even less when he snuck up on them. Raul simply knew this was the best way to make his appearance from a long line of painful trial and error, despite the fact that he barely was even aware that he was doing it.
It was by design
If she turned right now, she would see him, knee deep in snow, bare-chested, with his hip length grey hair falling around him in disarray, stooping as if to pass through a short doorway, with beady blue green eyes set into a bluff and uncannily lupine visage peering up the slope at her. There was still a good deal of distance between them. If she wanted she could run, and if she responded poorly, as Raul sadly knew was always a possibility, he could retreat back into the trees before she could do anything terribly hazardous to him.
Now it was just a matter of seeing what she did.
2671/2671
If he'd been the kind of person to question his own feelings at all, Raul might have wondered why that was. He'd grown near the coast where the weather was much more temperate, and winters were mild at the worst, to the point that there was little distinction between the cool months and any of the others. Why he'd grown to like the cold and the snow was a mystery, especially given that his initial reaction to the sight of the plants shedding their foliage and the animals retreating from exposure had been one of remorse, and sadness, yet another strange thing to further his alienation and isolation from this unfamiliar land. At first he'd been hesitant, skeptical of the icy embrace of the season, and had spent many days indoors in an attempt to escape it, but eventually his need to run freely through the great outdoors which had always been his home had grown too strong to resist, and not even the threat of the chilled stranger of Winter could dissuade him.
That had been a few weeks ago, when he first ventured forth into the frigid, white blanketed expanses, and since then, he'd grown to love its whites and greys and the mournful moans of the winds as much as he ever had the greens and blues and merry birdsongs of summer. It was in a way, as if he'd been transported to a brand new world. If he looked really hard he could still find familiar details of the home he'd been exploring and discovering all summer long. A crooked tree here, a stream there, an abandoned animal den there, broad strokes still shining through like hard details behind a sheer veil, but so many things were transfigured beyond recognition that it made even the most familiar paths and trails seem brand new, and it rekindled in him that same joy he'd felt when he first explored them. It was like the season had given him the gift of countless new things to be discovered. It was like unwrapping a gigantic present, one square foot of flakey white wrapper at a time. In no time Raul had found himself following those old game trails, and discovering new trails made accessible by the sheets of settled snow creating a gentle slope where once had been a sheer cliff, or where the weight had downed a tree, or where the small streams had frozen over. It was magic. It was magical. It filled him with such true childish joy that sometimes it made his chest ache.
He found that the snow he'd distrusted at first, for being cold and wet, and unfamiliar, was now something he thought of with the same fondness he felt for his mother and father, as if it were a treasured companion that joined him through his journeys, always obscuring discoveries. Over time the chilly touch of the snows had become like a welcome embrace, a preposition to a promise of joyful exploration. Raul found that his body was remarkably well adapted to the rigors of the cold and resistant to the sapping of warmth. He found that his shaggy grey mane blended in terrifically with the shifting white, and the drifts obscured his scent, while the trails of the hares he loved to hunted stood out starkly in them. It was like discovering a part of himself he'd never suspected, but had always keenly noted the absence of.
By the moon and stars, he LOVED winter!
And to winter, like an old friend, a trusted confidant, he fled when he needed guidance.
Raul didn't know what had happened. Unlike most of his peers, he'd abstained from the festival. Raul disliked crowds. He found the chattering of hundreds of voices too overwhelming and distracting, and he especially disliked fireworks, with their loud unexpected bangs, and their flashing and shimmering, which made him want to run for cover whenever they went off. If he'd had somebody to go with, someone who he trusted, someone who could hold his hand like his mother had when the summer storms came, and rub his head, he could have maybe gone, but Raul didn't have anyone like that, and with the more time that yawned between him and a time when he had, the less he suspected he ever would again. So he hadn't gone. He'd spent that night in the woods, sleeping in a burrow beneath a willow tree.
When he returned to the academy the next day, he found out what had happened. Holly was gone...
That was all anyone would tell him, or close enough. Sometimes they said, "There was an accident", or "I'm sorry, Did you know her?", when they saw the look on his face and how his ears drooped, but most of them just said she was "gone", like not even they had any better an idea of what that meant that Raul did. Raul knew what that had meant. He'd been at Haven, and Sanctum before that, long enough to know what "gone" meant when someone said it with lowered eyes and a hitch in their throat.
Still, he'd gone looking for her, in his foolish ignorance, hoping that maybe they'd just lost her somewhere. He'd been to the spot in the quad where he met her that one time, where a little banana plant was starting to bravely grow out of the snow, and he'd been back every day ever since, just to make sure it was doing alright. He'd been to the garden set aside for her club, where they grew all sorts of tasty plants, but Raul hadn't felt like eating any of them, even though the tomatoes looked really plump and tasty, despite the fact that it was totally out of season for them, as if Holly had just been there to tend to them. He'd even followed the scent of her all the way from the garden back to a room on the second floor of the dorms where everything smelled like her, that same floral smell, not like perfume, but like flowers, with a hint of sadness beneath it. He spent a long time there, fooled by the strength of that scent into thinking she was there, even though he couldn't open the door, even though the door did not open no matter how much he shook it and whined. A girl in the room next door had come out with tears in his eyes and asked him to leave, more kindly that she probably wanted to. He must had looked like a lost puppy pining after an absent master.
You'd never have guessed he only met her the one time. You'd have thought they had been friends for years. But if you thought that, you didn't know Raul very well. Raul felt the loss keenly, and no less keenly simply because the person lost had only been in his life for a comparatively small time. She'd been sad, she'd been crying when he met Holly, but she'd still been kind to him. She'd cuddled him, and rubbed his head, and even though she'd been a bit odd, even to someone as strange as Raul, she'd treated him without any pretense, without any of the uncertainty or suspicion that everyone else seemed to regard him with, at least for a time. Not a week had gone by since, without him thinking about that peculiar encounter, and despite how odd it had felt at times, he still looked back fondly on it, as having made a friend, as having made someone happy, and he'd looked forward to seeing her again, and had smiled whenever they crossed paths. Even though he knew how scary his smiles made him look. And though there had never been a sequel to that episode in the quad, he'd looked forward to seeing her again, and maybe having his ears rubbed again and curling around her and making her smile again.
But now that wasn't going to happen. Holly was gone.
Suddenly those moments when he'd thought fondly of her, had looked forward to bumping into her again, seemed less joyful and more tragic, like moments wasted, moments that he'd never have back. Missed opportunities...
So he'd gone back to the only friend he had left. Kersch had been a waking nightmare, and though he'd formed strong bonds, it was all something he'd rather forget entirely, and he couldn't look at any of the others without feeling that shame, and terror he'd felt in those blasted out streets creeping back up on him. Holly was the only friend he'd made where the memory didn't fill him with fear or anger. Now all he had was the snow, and the wilderness. They would always be there, and one day he would give his body to them, and return to the soil where hopefully a nice tree or flower would grow. But the snow, and the wilds had no ears with which to listen to his grief, and they had no voice with which to give him answers to it. At least, when he laid down in the snow and felt the cold like a knife on his bare skin, at least then he could forget that pain. At least while he hunted through the drifts for hares, he could pretend for a moment that nothing else existed but himself and his prey.
The wolf in his blood didn't grieve. It didn't grieve for Holly, or the dozen of lives it had ended in Kersch.
It was a ritual he'd partaken in for that last few days, but today was different. Today someone else was out in the woods. The cold and snow usually kept most students, except for the ones from Atlas, inside, and they preferred the urban training biome as opposed to the woodlands which were Raul's specialty.
The first clue of the intrusion was shattered stump, which looked like it had been smashed open by a massive hammer. Raul had found a lump of twisted lead nearby, stinking of fire dust and still warm. It had been a few days since the last snowfall, and he area was pretty well tracked out, so it was useless to try and track footprints, until he happened upon fragments of glass crushed against a rock that smelled of sharp spirits. He followed the most likely set of footprints from the broken bottle, until he started to be able to pick up the sounds of combat. It had been faint even to his ears, and he'd followed for nearly fifteen minutes before finally laying eyes upon the intruder.
Despite himself, and despite the fact that these grounds were public facilities, Raul couldn't help but think of the other student as an intruder. The wolf in him felt protective and territorial over this little patch of artificial woodland, and viewed the senseless destruction ofit's trees and the soiling of it's slopes with litter as a capitol offence. The... whatever was in him other than wolf... was intrigued, curious of this intruder and their odd behavior. In his limited experience, people were mostly predictable. He didn't always understand why people did certain things, like why people always looked at him with suspicion and sometimes fear, (though after Kersch he was starting to understand that), but he was fairly good at recognizing patterns of behavior even if the motives remained obscured. And if he knew one thing, loudly smashing one's way through the woods and leaving a trail of ruin and broken bottles, (he'd found a couple more along the way after the first), was a decidedly abnormal behavior. On the one hand it made him cautious, because who knew what an unstable and unpredictable person with huntsman training might do if they saw his hulking seven foot tall lupine silhouette stalking through the woods behind them, but on the other hand he felt it would be irresponsible to just leave such a creature to their own devices. For a reason he couldn't have articulated in a million years, he felt like the person responsible was in trouble somehow, and needed help. What kind of help? Only the moon and stars could say, but their weren't here, they wouldn't be hear for a few more hours at least. Only Raul was here, and that made it his problem.
He rounded a bend in the trail, just as it broke from the cover of the treeline and ascended a small slope. Raul knew this spot. The slope lead up to a small cliff face that overlooked the training facilities. You could see some of the quad from up there, and Raul liked to go up there on sunny days after he'd caught a hare to enjoy his meal in the sun. It wasn't sunny today. It was somewhat overcast and would probably snow again at some point, but you could still see a lot of the training grounds from up there. Maybe that was why the intruder had come this way.
He could see them perched at the peak, looking out towards the academy. It was a girl, a small girl. It was surprising. Seeing the state of some of the poor trees left like broken toys in the trail of this trespasser, Raul had expected some hulking creature like himself, despite the fact that he'd been at Haven and around people with super-natural abilities long enough that he really should have known better. It seemed incongruent that such a small looking person, stuffed into her winter gear, could be responsible for such wrath as was demonstrated by her path of ruin.
Raul stood as straight as he could, despite the discomfort it caused for a spine and hips better arranged for quadrupedal locomotion. He didn't know why, but people tended to get upset or angry with him when he approached on all fours. The same people also tended to get mad at him when he bumped into things, which was unfair in his mind, as if they didn't know how hard it was for him to balance on two legs. The firs flake of the expected snowfall fell on his snout, and a longer than expected pink tongue flicked it off. More flakes fell soon after on the his chest and shoulders, bare save for a fine pelt of translucent grey fuzz. He approached cautiously, making much more noise than necessary by deliberately crunching through an undisturbed drift that came up the the mid thigh of his arctic camo cargo pants.
He could have approached more quietly, but that would only have been useful if he meant to pounce on the intruder. He wanted her to hear him coming. Strangers tended not to react kindly when unexpectedly encountering a seven foot tall half wild beastman, and even less when he snuck up on them. Raul simply knew this was the best way to make his appearance from a long line of painful trial and error, despite the fact that he barely was even aware that he was doing it.
It was by design
If she turned right now, she would see him, knee deep in snow, bare-chested, with his hip length grey hair falling around him in disarray, stooping as if to pass through a short doorway, with beady blue green eyes set into a bluff and uncannily lupine visage peering up the slope at her. There was still a good deal of distance between them. If she wanted she could run, and if she responded poorly, as Raul sadly knew was always a possibility, he could retreat back into the trees before she could do anything terribly hazardous to him.
Now it was just a matter of seeing what she did.
2671/2671