[open] lost in the woods; any

[Lepis]

again you’re gone, off on a different path than mine i'm left behind wondering if i should follow The first time she saw Wolfbane was not a memory Lepis allows to surface often.  She isn’t sure why she does now, during this encounter with a complete stranger, except perhaps because nothing about this first impression is anything like the other. Her former husband had been fanged then, barely older than the adolescent Lepis. She’d looked up to where he’d been standing on the red precipice of Loess to address his new kingdom and had known, in that one very moment, that she loved him. Young Lepis had dismissed the sensation as some combination of adoration due a king and teenage hormones, and dutifully followed Arthas back to Sylva like the amenable young bride she was. It had taken years for her to acknowledge her true feelings for the Pirate King of Loess, and longer still to tell him. She has been wondering, ever more often of late, what might have happened if she’d just had the foresight to keep her mouth shut and serve as Cleric and Queen. Now she can find out, she thinks. Unencumbered by a husband or nursling children at her apron strings, Lepis is as close to free as she has been in over a decade. Well, there is the weight of responsibility to Loess, but the dun mare considers the red land as much a part of her as the wings at her shoulders. Those wings now resettle entirely subconsciously along her sides as the man mentions a trap, the sound of their stiff edges rustling inaudible over the sound of the wind. Their gazes meet for too long, Lepis’ narrowing only slightly when he glances toward the open air, though whether in amusement or puzzlement she does not show. “How far north have you been?” She asks him. A gust of cold winter wind gusts against her, and the dun mare shivers, but is grateful for the way it quiets the information. “There are two men in the North that Castile would like out of the way for a while.” Lepis describes what she knows of the two stallions, including the difficulty involved in capturing a magician and a fox. Tipp has been making it on his own for years, he’s said, but whether that includes experience in theft she does not know. Better safe than sorry, thinks the mare who so loves her plans. “Bring them back to Loess for a while,” the dun mare continues with a sidelong glance, “and I’d be in your debt.” Forgiveness is one of the first projections she’d perfected, and she never intends for a moment to truly owe him a boon of any sort. There are other ways to turn him away, if that simple emotion isn’t enough, but turn him away she will if it becomes necessary. Lepis hesitates just before casting another emotion, the compliance at the edge of her awareness. It would make him agree, she knows, would make this a simple task. Yet she doesn’t, still too off put by the earlier sensation of having her mind read to stretch her mental ability. LEPIS i’m the one who sees you home-- but now i’m lost in the woods and i don’t know what path you are on

@[Wolfbane]