[private] I got a brand new walk ||Castile, Lepis, Jesper||

[Lepis]

again you’re gone, off on a different path than mine i'm left behind wondering if i should follow Alcinder’s kidnapping and the interrupted attempt at her own capture has put Lepis on edge. Such is the life of one who embraces – or perhaps more accurately: allows – chaos, and the bed she cannot sleep in is one of her own making. Weariness is always at the edge of her awareness, and yet she rests fitfully and infrequently, torn from sleep by night terrors or the cold clench of dread. There are lines in her golden face, and dark hollows beneath her blue-grey eyes. The thrum of vivacity that such a life had given her in her youth is absent, but she is not yet ready to declare this method a failure. She is conversing with Castile, nearly ready to suggest what has been brewing in her mind since she had learned of the taking of Oceane’s son. She pauses, mouth half open to speak, and takes another – deeper – breath. “He’s done it,” she says aloud, aware that the words will mean little to Castile without context. But she knows the scent of the fox-shifting Jesper despite having met him only once before. He’d promised to come visit Taiga in the summer, but the summer had come and gone. And come and gone, and she is a little amused that he is finally here the third summer after his proposed visit. He comes to Loess, rather than Taiga, but she will take what she gets. “Let’s go,” she adds, turning from the dragon king and toward the canyon she’d suggested to Tipper as a holding place for captives. There’s a cool spring, and the trees there provide fruit and forage as well as shade. Expecting to see a grey unicorn with a teal mane, she is instead surprised to find a mealy bay stallion. Surprised, and then a great many other emotions as well. “Tell me you weren’t Tipper, too.” Lepis says, her voice as flat as her expression, neglecting to greet the black stallion at all. Her blue-grey gaze remains fixed on Wolfbane, and she tries and fails to swallow down the knot of emotion that is slowly rising in her chest. That she is so still is a sign of it, as is the thought she sends only to him. [Tell me you weren’t Gale.] 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

@[Castile]