I... was never a queen, she claims, excusing the effect her rule has had over the island. Faolain might not identify as a monarch, but she carried herself like one, even broken and battered as she was now. Wulfric had learned to identify would-be leaders by the subtleties of their panache; those born to the role did not wait to see if the world would react to their presence, they simply trusted that it would. They sought audiences, not companions. Subjects, not friends.


You know me? Her raspy voice is neither question nor answer but some strange combination, and so he answers it in like fashion, speaking for himself and more with confidence not wholly his own. "Yes, we know you." Everyone in Wulfric's limited sphere of influence knew who Faolain was even if they had not yet seen her. Once an object of his father's passion and mother's envy, she became his sister's sworn enemy.

Now, she seemed something else beyond that.


She mentions the rivers and his head tilts, mentally ticking off the days in his mind since the mudslide. Weeks had passed, certainly; months, even, he thought. It was hard to measure time when your days lacked both structure and sunlight, but the event had happened after her absence, he was certain of it. "She is not the same," he answers absently, thinking of the river that swept through the center of the Ridge, her waters darkened by runoff silt and her course changed by the additional soil. The jungle had been quick to reclaim the freshly opened space, but she, like him, still wore her self-inflicted scars.


Her question as to who he was hung unanswered in the air for a long time as he battled with whether he should answer her question or her intent. His name carried little weight in this jungle, crowded as it was by other souls trying to get by, and would not answer the question beneath her words. He was Wulfric, the son of Rougaru and Vanya, disgraced and abandoned though he was. The prince of an empire that had faded far more quickly than it had been built.


"I am nobody worth knowing." he finally answered after a long pause, his scarred face rumpled with conflicting emotions. He wasn't sure how she would react when the sun faded from her eyes and revealed his gruesome appearance, but he doubted her reaction would be favorable. It had taken months for him to understand that it was the sun himself that blistered his skin and set his throat to constricting, and nearly a year for his mother to stop trying to send him out beyond the jungle's shelter. Longer, still, for him to understand the paths needed to avoid even the slightest exposure lest the light reignite an old, festering wound.


His wounds no longer wept, and he no longer resembled a zombie quite the same way he had as a colt, but his back and body were laced with evidence of his struggle. Wulfric would never win a beauty contest, nor turn the eye of a partner in his direction. He was the gruesome, forgotten ghost of Paradise, and no one she should remember.


"But you are very much someone worth knowing," He murmured to the disheveled void of a mare. "Or so the jungle says." He had heard stories told of the wild Ridge women and the way their love for each other grew as quickly as their disdain for men did. He'd heard of how the little void of a mare had staved off oncomers twice her size for the sake of her herd, and of how she'd managed to hold her corner of Atlantis for nearly as long as the wolf king himself.


She didn't look like much now, but there was still promise in her bones.

"What will you do next?"

Colt - Young - Mutt - 16h wfg - Silver Black Overo - Rougaru x Vanya