Summer filled the prairies with life. The grass grew taller than some equines, bountiful and fluffy, in shades from emerald green to butter gold. Gentle slopes shaped the flow of the land as they angled into each other, ruffled here and there by thick groups of tall trees that reminded Kassandra of eyebrows. It was fun to imagine Sideralis was the face of a giant being who made up the world and everything in it, and Kas was walking along his eyelashes in the long grass. It felt more physical and corporeal than this talk of gods and Tempus and abstract concepts of divinity, and yet the world was always theirs and never hers.

Perhaps thinking they lived on the face of a giant was childish. Growing up, growing old, and maturity were all concepts Kassandra was struggling with; she felt she should be more adult without knowing, exactly, what that entailed. Psychologically, the early years of her youth had been stolen from her and so with that development gone she would always be slightly behind. But who really defined what it meant to grow, and be grown? Was is the trees, who grew all their lives until they splintered and fell under their own weight? Or the grass and it’s cycles of sprouting up and limping over? Was it the sprouts of Creeping Jenny and their tiny, yellow flowers, fighting up through the grass shoots only to be defeated and trodden down, or munched upon by some unknowing cervine?

Kas stepped over a brook, about a foot wide from bank to bank, and let one of her hind hooves draw through the pleasant summer water. The wind is sweet in the switchgrass and the sky above is clotted with gray clouds; they are false prophets, their bellies blue-gray with rain that refuses to fall.

There’s a distant whoosh and then something goes speeding by her, Oculos hard on its trail as the hound tosses up clods of silt and grass, paws gripping the earth so hard with his strides even his dewclaws furrow the ground. The rabbit, Kassandra realizes, bobs and weaves in a serpentine escape pattern, but it is no match for Oculos, as he was meant to bring wolves to bay, and his heart is full of the joy of the chase and hunt.

“Oculos,” she scolds, her voice quiet on the wind but loud in his head, as such is their bond. “Don’t kill it, please.” The response in her own brain is a flat line of red instinct and the vague feeling of jubilation.

Kassandra sighs and hangs her head; there comes a small ping of acknowledgment at the back of her mind and she breathes a little easier.

Oculos, meanwhile, is churning up earth as he speeds after the hare; so focused on the hunt and thrill of the run he doesn't realize, as he is speeding up a hill after his quarry, he is about to run straight into the hind end of--

oof,

Oculos' neck is jarred and he stumbles back, shaking his head. His vision is slightly blurry, opening his eyes painful, but he falls on his rump and looks up and--

a-- giant-- white bear? he murmurs, his voice a whine. He sits there, looking confused for a moment, before the implications fall on him like a summer thunderstorm and he leaps up with a yelp. a giant white bear!

And, in staying with Oculos form, instead of turning on his heel and running like any sane creature should, he dances on excited feet and yells, kass! kass! come see this!

She is at the bottom of the hill now, looking up towards his jubilant yelps, and her ears perk forward as she gasps in wonder. "Oh! Oh! Hello!" she calls, making her way up the slope.

Both of them are completely unafraid; they've not the sense to fear, and are entirely too curious to tilt towards trepidation.

"SPEECH." ! Oculos speech ! @Ciaran

Oculos, fascinated in perhaps what should be the face of fear, pranced on his paws with his tongue lolling. He was easily bored and so finding something so strange in a place so beige as this brought him an obscene amount of joy; of course, only a hound with the attention span of a gnat could find the bright blooms and sweeping hillocks of Sideralis boring. Oculos didn’t much care for things unless they were moving-- or potentially dangerous.

Kassandra was absolutely smitten with the large beast and it’s off-white pelt. She thought it looked somewhat grumpy and adorable; if she’d arms for hugging she may have thrown them ‘round it’s midsection and squeezed ‘till the stuffing came out of it. She’d seen black bears before, even here, snuffling up tubers and hunting for berries; but a beast of such striking size and composure? It was truly an enchanting sight.

And the bear’s companion! For that is surely what she must be, all green and gold and fantastic. The crest of feathers down her spine flashed and glimmered in the summer sun; and her antlers! She squinted at them for a moment to decide if they actually glowed, or just appeared to. “You have such lovely antlers!” she beamed, and then after: “and feathers. You are quite lovely in general. Though… is it hot under there?”

Oculos rolled his eyes. caligo’s teats, with the gods-damned antlers again, he grumbled under his breath. Kas swished him with her tail.

The question about the heat brings an irascible smile to Kassandra’s face; she looks for all the world like a child faced with a sweet of her disliking. “To tell it true, no, I loathe it.” She had been trying quite hard up until now to ignore her discomfort. “I’m much more a winter creature, I suspect. I try not to complain about things we get no say in, but I do hate it.”

"SPEECH." ! Oculos speech ! @Ciaran
kas has a crush oops

If it weren’t for hearing him speak and seeing the gentle lifting and falling of his chest, the polar bear could have been a stuffed animal. His stillness made it all the more tempting to snuggle up against him and feel the softness of his fur; if she’d arms, she’d have thrown them around his neck in a great bear hug. The thought made her giggle out loud; it made her look a fool, snickering for no reason.

ignore her, Oculos said, even though no one could understand him, she has issues.

The stranger was a beautiful specimen, to be sure; she seemed to be some glorious amalgam of bird and equine and cervid, what with her glorious rack of teal antlers. Compared to her own visage, dark blue splattered with white, with tangled silver hair and fetlocks oft stained by mud, Kas felt quite plain. She wondered what it felt like to have feathers; what it felt like when the fingers of the wind rustled through them, tousled them like children’s hair.

The teal princess smiled and it made Kassandra as warm as the golden stripes upon her new friend’s withers. She found herself beaming goofily at Ciaran, head tilted on an angle. “You look quite lovely when you run,” she said before she could stop herself. Hot embarrassment flooded her face and she shook herself from her stunned stupor. “I mean-- with the-- with the feathers. It’s all quite impressive.” There. Covered that slip-up nicely. No one would ever tell.

The fact remained that Kassandra was nearing 9 and she still spoke as though she was fresh-out-the-egg. Some things would (probably) never change.

The way the woman spoke of where she was born made Kas long even more for the chill touch of the colder seasons. Furae, for all its negatives (like the fact it’s king kept her locked in a tower), had four seasons, and three of them remained comfortably tepid, if not down-right chilly. She used to steal wicks from the candles she’d been allowed to have and draw fun shapes in the frost on her window-panes.

“Your homeland sounds incredible,” Kassandra said, unable to stop the dreamy notes from slipping back into her tone. “Especially the bit about the lights in the sky. I didn’t get to see the sky much as a child. I had two windows and the city blocked out most everything.”

Kassandra gave her best bow-- still in good form, even after all these years. Her etiquette teachers had done well. “The pleasure is mine. My name is Kassandra, and this skinny wretch is Oculos, the one who makes snide comments and thinks I can’t hear.”

no, I know you hear me, Oculos said, curtly tucking his hindquarters underneath him as he sat beside her. that’s the whole point. The hound sat stoic and still for a moment, as though inviting an oppositional argument; but then, something rustled the grass nearby, and another hare shot out from the undergrowth and took out across the prairie. Kassandra watched in slow motion as Oculos' predatory brain kicked into high gear, eyes flying wide, and he was off like an arrow from a bow, zipping through the shoulder-high yarrow and sending indigo Prairie Smoke pollen clouds into the air.

"Sorry!" Kas said over her shoulder as she took off after her best-- most embarrassing-- friend. "Hope we meet again soon!"

By the time she caught up to him-- panting and empty-pawed, but satisfied-- the white bear was not even a dot on the horizon behind her.

"SPEECH." ! Oculos speech ! @Ciaran
sorry i decided to have her exit this cause it's been sitting a while <3