beyond the sacred smoke; Jah-lilah

[woodrow]

Woodrow is delighted to have his shape back, not an original shape but a shape all his own - coyote. His tongue lolls happily out of his mouth as he lopes between the tall grasses going brown from the long summer and the new autumn that lifts a hand to them. The days are warm and the nights have a bit of a chill bite to them. But no matter, the moon is the same and he likes to sit atop a hill and sing to it in this shape that has come back to him. How it had hurt to reach for the coyote and find it trapped beneath his skin, pushed by the Mountain and her anger until enough of them had recovered their senses and made some sort of amends to the magic in the land. So he was coyote again, and little enough of horse though the horse bits of him came through now and then. When they did, he remembered two mares he’d liked more than well enough and two little balls of foal-fluff that had more of his mischief in them than they ought to have had. Even now though, he can call his stallion shape back to him but he prefers the coyote’s shape. His loping pace switches to a low slink as he hunts for mice in the meadow, leaping on them and trapping them with his paws only to let them run away afterwards, their hearts surely in their mouths from the fright he’s just given them. His laughter precedes him, as mischievous as his amber eyes are from their gleaming points in the grass where he lies, rolling over onto his back as his paws scrabble at the sky because he’s tired of chasing mice and scaring them. His mind turns back to more equine pursuits, the color-changer and the rabbit-shifter, and his bright eyed daughters. What’s become of them? He hasn’t caught their scents in a long time, but then he’s only ever roamed the meadow and the forest, and that one time he had a strange dream quest about running a race with a human child on his coyote back… Pah! Beqanna was a strange place! The coyote flips back over and hoists himself off the ground. He slinks through the grasses, only pausing to look up at the sky - night is coming, dusk colors chase the sun away and shadows grow longer on the ground. He snaps at his own shadow, warning it away, before laughing (coyotes are mad creatures, not all there and more present than they know) and loping off towards a hill except that hill is occupied by a red mare. Hm… he thinks to himself, slinking up the hill anyway and plopping down on his hindquarters beside her, tongue lolling out of his toothy mouth. “Nice evening, eh?”

[Jah-Lilah]

Jah-Lilah

someday, we will foresee obstacles

So she says it's time she goes...


The red mare was drained. After the collapse of Taiga following her adventure with Wolf-of-the-Water, she had nothing left emotionally. She had come to the quiet of the meadow this autumn afternoon to collect herself and her thoughts. She had stayed even as the sun began to fade in front of her. She grazed absently on her favorite hill, eyes up and watching the other small groups of equine milling about. She had no interest in them, but enjoyed people-watching nonetheless. She wondered if any of them were even concerned with all the happenings around them, or if they reveled in their feigned ignorance of Beqanna politics. She snorted, raising her head and testing the wind. No, no one she knew played in the valley below, and part of her was glad. She wasn't ready to cry upon the shoulder of a loved one just yet.

She smelled his earthy scent before she saw him, could tell he was canine, but not wholly. Another shifter, she assumed. Their genetics were rampant with the incredible trait, and it always impressed Jah-Lilah with how seamless so many of them made the transition. A rustling of leaves behind and to the side of her tells of his approach, and her ear swivels to pinpoint his exact location. He is yippy and yappy, and all things coyote. Stealth was clearly not his goal as he trounced over to her, mouth grinning wide like most of his kind. His tongue lolls out the side of his toothy smile and he relaxes beside her, looking up. She turns her head, blinking down at him slowly. He is a cute little thing, tawny and scraggly, but cute anyways. She snortles down at him, then returns to the sunset. "So it is, Little Sunkmanitu. She exhales gently, she doesn't welcome him with open arms, but she doesn't shoo him away either. Perhaps she is receptive to a bit of company this evening while she mourns the loss of many of the Earth-Mother's children. The whole redwood forest, gone. She was still in shock.


...But wanted to be sure, I know.

@[woodrow]

[woodrow]

Woodrow had not a concern in a single bone of his body.
He’d not seen his mate (if he could call her that…) in what seemed like forever or their two mischievous daughters though he scented them every so often but their scents had grown fainter and fainter as the days grew shorter and the nights even longer. Still, he was not overly concerned - to each their own and he’d kept to his coyote ways more than anything else. He knew that his was a transient existence and nothing much stayed or stayed the same. Woodrow did not care that mountains had moved or that forests had fallen - that is what nature does, changes the face of the earth and often, gods were involved with sticky mischievous hands that liked to meddle so he let things be as they are - as they are meant to be.

But the red mare oozed concern and exhaustion, like prey that has almost given up because the hunt is taking far too long and the predators are just playing with their food now. He almost pities her for an instant between tongue-lolls and pants but even he couldn’t sustain the pity long enough for it to matter much to him. Her troubles were her own and she seemed less inclined to make mention of them as she turns her head down to him and blinks slowly like a turtle just coming awake from a great long sleep. Except she was much prettier than a turtle, though the more equine part of his brain that could appreciate long clean legs and nice red hips. She agrees with him about the evening though and even calls him a name in a language he’s heard from no other lips but his family’s own. Mostly his grandmother talked to him that way. Not that she looks anything like that wily old medicine hat mare who simply refused to die - something about a pact with Coyote himself.

She exhales and he feels her grassy breath on his face, closes his eyes to it and shifts his shape back to that of a bay dun roan stallion. Parts of him are still coyote like the tail that brushes against his hindquarters or the way his legs ends in paws instead of hooves. He chuckles and there is a genuine twinkle of mirth and madness (the two were never far apart from one another) in his amber-colored eyes; “No one has called me that since I was a pup! Um… foal, mostly pup - I was stuck a lot in that form.” For a moment, he looks rather bashful. He doesn’t usually offer up things like that so freely to strangers, especially those he’s just met but then Woodrow is an easy-going soul and is rather trusting.

“Mostly my grandmother called me that whenever I tried to nurse from her. She could stomach the coyote teeth unlike my own mother who couldn’t.” There’s no pain in him - just truth, simple and uncomplicated as he looks from her to the meadow below from the top of her hilly overlook. It’s a nice view from up there, for all that he would rather be slinking through the grass in chase of mice to scare and maybe eat.

ooc: eh this post sucked, my son kept interrupting me lol. next one will be better! <3

[Jah-Lilah]

Jah-Lilah

She hopes we can be friends.


The creature certainly knew his was around the place, even if he was not familiar to Jah-Lilah. But from her experience most canines did well with their sense of direction, even the shifters like this one. The only thing that gave him away was his scent, other than that it was completely believable he was truly a coyote. He was nonchalant, goofy, carefree. All traits she knew very well that nearly all of the little dogs carried. He looks up at her, tongue lolling out of his mouth and grinning, and Jah-Lilah can't help but smile at him. Little clown, how silly the beasts were. He didn't ask of her troubles, and she didn't offer them up, so already they were getting along fine in her opinion. Even had he asked, he wouldn't have cared to focus long enough to hear her out. It's not his fault, it's in his breed. They came by it honestly, at least. 

They exchange breath and scents, and he does the transformation trick that so many equine here are capable of doing...although his is different. He grows taller, but half of him got lost in translation. My flower-child stifles a laugh as she looks him over. His tail still wags enthusiastically, but it is not long and silky like it should be, it is still that of the coyote. His dark hooves aren't present either, just the four toes of a coyote. He laughs with her, and suddenly she doesn't feel so bad. He understands her native tongue and she is momentarily impressed. It is such a rare moment when she can use the old language. He tells her about his family and suddenly rendered shy, and she finds it very endearing. "Was your Grandmother a native mare, like me? Not many are familiar with the old languages..." She speaks with genuine interest, curious to learn about another like herself. "Even as a foal, you had canine teeth?" Her eyebrows are raised in curiosity, bad mood beginning to wane as the roan stallion entertains her.


I think, yeah, I guess we can say hi.

stronger than you know

@[woodrow]

[woodrow]

Woodrow would never be familiar to most.
They saw what they wanted to see and what they often saw was a coyote slinking through the grass. He knew what he was and wasn’t - both horse and coyote, a half-breed that did not truly belong to either species and it seemed that both horses and coyotes knew that he was different. In his horse skin, his coyote scent was still present and in his coyote skin, there was something prey-ish about him that kept the other coyotes away. Only his family could stomach him, from his grandmother to his sometimes rabbit-shifting mate and their children to a color-changing mare he’d like to think he’d befriended. But he knew the lay of the land better than most because he’d run it in either form and could slink into places most horses could never even get to.

She distracts him with a smile, because who can resist a coyote’s grin?

Then he is half and half and not entirely one thing or the other. It is a gamble that he took with his transformation and he can see that she wants to laugh at how ridiculous he looks. That alone delights the trickster in him since he was a clown at heart. But they are on the subject of his grandmother and he thinks of that wild mare that he hasn’t seen in quite some time but smells her every now and then, out there in the meadow or down by the river and he knows she’ll look as she always has - fierce and wise, and he cannot help but chuckle because he knew how deep the vein of kindness and love ran in her for her bloodline.

“She is,” he corrects her, speaking of his grandmother in the present tense because nothing could kill that immortal mare. Well, something had and that’s how she earned her immortality and it was always a favorite tale of his when she wasn’t talking to him about the trickster-god he took after. “Right down to the feathers in her hair just like you.” and he reaches out, not paying attention to the decorum of keeping to one’s self and things like distance, and he lips at one of the feathers in her wild dark hair. He lets it go and cocks his head to one side, losing more of the coyote traits when he doesn’t concentrate so much on holding them and he is slowly becoming more and more of a horse beside her.

“I think she only speaks the one tongue besides the common one we all know and use. She was raised on it as much as she was raised up on her own mother’s milk. But she doesn’t talk much about that time. It pains her too much I think, to remember the good times and the bad. Grandmother tends to focus on the here and the now, and her brood of foals and grand-foals most of which I believe are now all grown up.” He realizes he might be rambling but thinks the red mare doesn’t seem to mind since she has a look of genuine interest on her face. It almost looks like a hunger if he’s reading her right but he could never guess as to what she might be hungering for.

“She’s still around here somewhere, I smell her from time to time but she keeps to herself a lot these days.” For just a moment, he frowns. Grandmother never seemed right unless she was rearing some foal from the ground up whether it was hers or someone else’s. She took to mothering more than anything else, recognizing the value in new life and giving it a chance to thrive in the world. He shook his head and grinned again as she asks about his canine teeth. “What happened was my mother gave birth to me but when she looked around at me for the first time, she saw a coyote and not a horse. I gave her the fright of her life! I couldn’t control the ability to shift back then, so I sometimes found myself stuck as one or the other and more often than not, it was as a coyote.”

Woodrow laughs; he’s never harbored a single bad thought or ill wish against his poor mother who couldn’t handle him. “My mother tried to raise me for a short while but she couldn’t take to how nippy I was when I nursed. The teeth bothered her so much that she went to Grandmother and asked if she could handle me. I was stuck more and more in coyote shape then, and Grandmother just laughed and took me in like it made no difference to her if I was horse or not.” He leans in closer to the red mare and there is a conspiratorial look in his amber eyes; “Between you and me, I think that old mare would nurse anything even if it wasn’t a shape-changing horse. She’d give a bear and a snake the chance to live if they could take milk from her.”

The laughter that came from him then was more of a bark and a bay than anything equine. He is happy to be talking about his family and happier to be providing a distraction to her since she seemed to have been staring off into space as if something troubled her. Woodrow figures that everyone tells their story in their own time and he’s never asked anyone to tell it before they are ready. He settles back on his haunches, shifting his weight and growing more and more comfortable the longer he stands beside her. She makes him that much more horse the longer he’s there and he hasn’t abided much in that shape in a long long time. It almost felt good to forget about his coyote skin for a little while.