The Moonless Sky [Goliath]

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It was boring being alone. Inara trotted back and forth along the waters edge, feeling cool, icy spray lap at her paws, drenching her thin pelt as she ran, splashing through the waves. The scent of salt hung heavily upon her, the marks of a day of frolicking at the beach. The scents of the pack wafted around her. She knew this was pack territory. She knew that, wasn't stupid, was she? Inara had lingered at the borders for a day or so, hoping, eagerly anticipating the arrival of someone from the pack. She could talk to, or argue with. Hardly mattered in the grand scheme of things.

But no one came.

Inara slowed her pace to a tired trot, light, slim frame bringing the delicately-sized creature right to the edge of the land - a small 'cliff-like' structure overlooking the sea. Her tail wagged back and forth, bright eyes staring wistfully across the vast expanse of the glittering waters, to the tiny island some distance away. It looked great fun, she was getting rather bored here.

Only... Inara didn't know how to swim. Her ears snapped backward instantly, fangs biting at the air as imaginary laughter rang out around her with unholy glee.

A wolf? Not know how to swim? How pathetic!
What use are you, then?
Not a hunter, not a warrior, not a healer - nothing!
Lucky you left - or the pack would have cast you out first.

Inara flattened her ears abashedly, a low whine slipping from her muzzle in sadness. She was alone. There was no one to see her in this moment of weakness, where she could be the pathetic child everyone had always proclaimed her to be. It was a while before the young wolf found the courage once more to lift her head high, breeze ruffling at her fur playfully.

She'd show them all! She'd make a name for herself so that everyone around her would like her and be utterly envious they weren't in her position!

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Despite the tranquil waters and the restful breeze, the shore alongside the Xayar forest was far from calm, for along the sands wandered a wolf – a brute of monstrous proportions, whose presence seemed to quell even the chattering of birds and silence the scurrying cretins that dwelled amidst the low shrubs. The forest had accepted him as its lord for the short time it took him to pass through, for nature knew better than to challenge him by blaring a discordance of sounds upon the calamitous beast.

The beach was mostly quiet, save for the quaint rushing of water over the sands that ridged under the tide’s rippling force. Goliath’s absence from Ina’mos had been a productive journey; his relationship with Descai’s alpha had been broken seemingly beyond repair, but a diminutive female by the name of Zirena had mended his animosity through a truce, if only for a short while until the day that she fulfilled the deal and delivered his pups into the world. Why else would he have ventured so far north in returning to his home, if not to abide by his promise – Descai would be safe from himself and Kairos, and that plainly meant he would not trespass upon their territory again. Breaking that truce so early in its conception would have been a fruitless endeavour, and so now he trespassed on this land that belonged to a pack he had only ever heard in passing. His presence was met by no resistance whatsoever, and so he was content to pass through uninhibited and peaceably, spurred on by the impatience to return home.

Home. No matter how many times that perplexing word came to his mind, it seemed more like a foreign utterance – a sound with no meaning. Ina’mos was his home, but the concept was estranged to the enormous brute, who had spent so very little of his life upon those placid shores. Wandering was where his home had been until now, a place changing with the rising and setting of the sun, but now, his home was a finite residence encircled by the unforgiving sea. But in returning, the bittersweet melancholy had enflamed like a wound that refused to close, refusing to submit to time. He had expected sorrow to plague his departure – but he had not expected it to haunt his return so deeply. Perhaps the memories that brought him joy were not so distanced from the ones that brought him torment.

Ina’mos – where has family had been slaughtered.
Ina’mos – where his mother had given him life.

What was he to make of this duality? His home was sacred for both the shame and the hope that it brought him - there was no way to overcome that paradox. Sorrow was the soul’s inability to let go of weakness, so did that make him weak? A dark smirk distorted the confliction in his features.

Of course not. He was the strongest beast he knew – an entity built from enormity and notched by the wrath of the divines. There was no earthly force that could knock him from that cathedra of power… except the madness that traversed his lineage like a gruesome shadow, finding residence in a new host with each generation’s passing. That thought brought no change to his otherwise bare expression, which was caught between a longing to return to his island, and the bitterness that budded from the seeds of his divergent thoughts.

A sound distracted him from his thoughts – a cry, a whine, almost so distant it could have merely been the rasping of wind in the nearby trees. His ears raised in scrutiny, the distraction prolonging his return to Ina’mos, but the pitiful quality of the sound was too great an intrigue for him to disregard. He paced further along the beach, seeing nothing out of the ordinary - nothing, until his eyes adjusted to the vastness of the shore and honed upon a tiny beige figure that blended seamlessly with the hue of the sand. The wind from the sea was too strong to allow its scent to reach him, and from this distance he had no perception of what it was, whether a stoat or a piece of driftwood, or any other marine debris.

The closer he came, the more its shape became clearer. It held a distinctively canine form – the exception being that it was immeasurably smaller than any creature he’d met, shorter than even Zirena who he had towered over by an almost laughable extent. It seemed to skip alongside the tide, antagonising the sprays of water and splashing amidst the shallow swell. His ears flattened as he inspected its frivolous behaviour – surely this was a pup, having meandered too far from its den. It was the size of a youngling, it seemed, and it had the naïve semblance. It would probably drown without the supervision of its guardian, or worse – be met with a force who could swallow the pitiful child in a single bite. He bared his teeth in curiosity, idly wondering whether his own jaws would fit around the creature, before his lips closed again with a subtle smile. Though he didn’t particularly want to witness the drowning of a pup, he wasn’t against the idea of chastising it and watching it flee in terror back to its pack.

His tongue rolled out a growl that rose above the wind and waves, overcoming the distance that stretched between them. “Pup,” his voice resounded loudly, maintaining his leisurely pace. “Why have you wandered so far from your mother’s teat?” If this whelp was smart, it would use the remaining distance between them to flee.

TAGGED: Inara
OOC: I've redone Inara's coding to make the text darker (as I had a little difficulty reading it haha whoops)