ORIGIN

Dovefeather had found a new friend, a wonderful friend, one who reminded her of what she imagined a child of Giggle to be like-- a bit manic, questioning and brilliant all at the same time. She trusted her instinct on this one, carrying her newly glowing stick in her jaws, baubled feather bobbing along side her face as she went. It wasn't too long before the thick forest of ferns and vines broke out into a rather empty clearing beside the cavern's wall, the ground oddly smooth under their pawsteps.

The feline darted forward, practiced foot falls weaving between two perfectly similar pools of what might have been water. She placed the stick at a divot in the earth that was lined with moss-- the place where she usually slept. Afterwards, she turned and prowled back to the middle of the water and bowed her head.

"O All Mother..."

The words slipped from her maw as though habit or compulsion, before her pale golden eyes returned to the coyote, tail twitching. To either side of her were two perfectly round pools of liquid that seemed still as ice. They appeared to have no texture, reflecting absolutely nothing in their matte appearance-- flat, unnatural. The air still had a faint, metallic scent, but otherwise only the chill lingered in the air from the time the beast of many eyes had visited.

[ ref: 1 + 2 ]

"The water here has become tainted. Be careful not to fall in, it can take all of the warmth from your body. Some kind of magic, perhaps. When the Eyes first became this way, I dared to enter the All Mother's waters, trying to understand what had happened, and I lost control of my limbs. They went numb from the freezing temperatures... It is not something I would want anyone else to experience."

The cat's half tail twitched, her eyes closing shut as she waited to hear what the other gembound thought about the situation.

"Basil Speech" "Dovefeather Speech"

Macawi followed her new friend past the trenches and over to two pools of water she had not previously seen before. She’d only been to Eridanus a few times, and had never gone this far. The closer she came to the Eyes, the more obvious it was that something was… very wrong with the water in these pools. In fact, this whole area felt… wrong. The air smelled faintly of metal, and it was colder here than the rest of Eridanus, made clearer by the fact that Eridanus was actually quite warm. The coyote felt the hairs on her nape stand up straight, and she looked around warily.

The water… was still, like it wasn’t really water. Macawi gave each pool as wide a berth as she could, staying directly in the center of both of them. Some sort of Energy (whether it actually emanated from the pools or she just thought it did) seemed to flow from the still water, and it creeped her out to no end. She watched as Dovefeather placed her Baubled stick into what looked to be a nest. A nest? Here? “My friend, how do you sleep here? Can you not feel the wrongness of the place?”

Macawi’s right ear twitched as she listened to her friend’s words. She sat down slowly, absorbing the information. So the water was tainted, maybe by magic, and it was so cold that it basically froze your limbs if you fell in… Mm… This was bad. This sounded like the work of Bad Magic. There was Good Magic, like Macawi’s Light Spell, and things like that. And then there was the kind of Magic you wanted to avoid – the kind of stuff people used for nefarious purposes. “Does Dovefeather know of anyone who might want to hurt the All Mother, or these pools? Have you noticed any… suspicious activity here recently? Perhaps it was another Gembound who caused this. And, if not, we can only assume this has happened for a reason which the All Mother will reveal when She wants to.”

"Speech"

Dovefeather met Macawi's near matching pale gaze, her ears laying back in response to the coyote's first question. "I was born here, I have always slept here, and I will continue to do so until the All Mother regains her strength," the feline explained curtly, her tail swishing behind her hind quarters. The cat did listen to the rest of the canine's words before nodding shortly.

"I don't remember it very well, but when the Eyes first closed like this, I was bringing a friend of mine, Giggle, to the pools to show her. There were many gembound there, I could not name them all even if I knew them, but after someone rescued me from the waters... There was a thing, on the ceiling. It was black, and had many eyes-- I saw it for just a moment, and then it fled. The others went after it, but I have not seen them since."

All explained, the feline glanced sideways towards the water and considered the situation. She was only just starting to recover from the hypothermia, and she had been wanting to talk to her sisters before darting off into the unknown... But perhaps the All Mother was waiting for her to go forth and solve the problem. She wasn't sure, though, and it made her hesitant to make any rash decisions.

"Basil Speech" "Dovefeather Speech"

Macawi could hear the curtness in her cat-friend’s voice as she spoke, and knew she had offended her in some way. Her tail wagged a little behind her and she nodded in understanding as Dovefeather insisted that she had always slept here, and would always sleep here. “Fair enough, my friend. To each their own, yes? Macawi meant no offense.” She gave her friend a lopsided grin and turned her head to the side to flash her gem at the cat in a friendly ‘wink.’ Truly, it was not Macawi’s job to offer advice where none was asked for. She did it anyways, all the time, because she loved talking. But when she overstepped her boundaries, she immediately retreated, no questions asked. Dovefeather was much older than her. The cat could do what she wanted.

The coyote tilted her head as she listened to her friend talk about… a thing that had been on the ceiling? “What kind of thing was on the ceiling?” she asked. “What did it look like? Does This One remember?” A thing on the ceiling that… everyone else had chased after. And then she had not seen them since. Hmm… Macawi turned her head and glanced at one of the pools of water. Slowly, she rose, and stood over it, staring into its depths. The water was eerily still, and the fur on her nape stood up again. Something was definitely wrong with the water.

The coyote stood and stared for a good long while. Had Dovefeather begun talking, she would not have heard a word the cat said. The stillness of the water seemed to mesmerize her, and she wondered what it would feel like to dip a paw into its, apparently, icy depths. She wouldn’t jump in, as her friend had, but in order to truly understand darkness, one has to enter it. In order to truly understand what was going on, she’d have to allow it to consume at least a small part of her. She knew bad things might happen when she did this, but she was willing to risk it. With a deep breath, she slowly submerged a single delicate paw into the still water…

"Speech"

As the coyote dips her paw into the water, she will find that it is a fairly mild temperature. No biting chill meets her toes. However, there is no reflection of the coyote on the glassy surface of the pools of water, and no ripples emanate from the touch. It looks as though her paw vanishes into the still water. Nothing seems to happen for about a second, then - it's as if something has grabbed the coyote's paw, yanking her forward into the deep pool of water.

Dovefeather's expression shifted as the canine prodded questions at her. The brows above her eyes, subtle as they were, knit together, and her tail twitched as she frowned.

"I didn't get a good look at it, I'm sorry."

The feline watched as the coyote drew closer and stared into the water, clearly trying to comprehend what had happened. Her pale eyes stared in silence, not putting out a single word of protest until Macawi raised her paw without a word and lowered it into the water.

"I wouldn't recommend doing that,"

Came her warning as the paw seemingly disappeared into the depths. Nothing seemed to happen for a moment, until abruptly the coyote was jerked, pulled, towards the depths of the pool.

Like a flash, the feline darted forward, lips pulled back to reveal crystalline teeth. There was little she could do if the larger gembound fell into the water, but if she could latch on to the coyote's tail and put enough force pulling back to keep her from tipping in... Maybe, just maybe, she could keep someone from dying to the sickened waters.

Yet she wasn't fast enough. Her teeth snapped down on open air and a high pitched squeal came from the back of her throat, blood gushing in her jaws-- she had bit her tongue, and she stumbled, falling on to the hard ground.

"Basil Speech" "Dovefeather Speech"

Macawi knew something bad might come of her dipping a paw into creepy, silvery, non-reflective, non-rippling water. In fact, she had been pretty damn sure of it – no ‘might’s’ about it. She was tempting Fate here, but personally, she saw this almost as her job. Were she to ever write a job description for being her, ‘Must Constantly Tempt Fate’ would probably be just below ‘Must Be Slightly Insane.’ Still, it was a shock to her system when, after a moment of nothing happening, she was suddenly being pulled into the pool of ‘water.’ (Macawi, at this point, highly doubted that this pool of liquid was water. Water was the Drink of the Gods, the Bringer of Life. This stuff was… bad and gross, and quite possibly Evil.)

Up until now, the coyote had never tried to swim before. She realized with quite a bit of fear that she had no idea how to swim. Or maybe it was just that she was surprised her limbs weren’t working properly? Who knew? All she did know was that her legs were flailing about in the pool of Evil Not-Water and that she had to keep her head above the stuff. If she went completely under, something told her she would never come up again.

She sucked in a gasping breath, and then another, and then forced herself to stop freaking out. She needed to focus on pulling herself back up out of the Not-Water before the Not-Water pulled her farther into Itself. She kept her eyes locked firmly on Dovefeather, who was now… on the ground? And looked to be in pain. What had happened in the ten seconds she’d been in the pool? “Friend!” she called, trying to distract herself so she wouldn’t think about whatever might be underneath her. “Are you all right? Macawi is coming!”

She placed her front paws onto the edge of the pool and tried to haul herself up… The Not-Water tried to pull her back in, but she grit her teeth, and struggled against it, dragging herself up and forward until her chest and face fell onto the blessed earth. She kicked some with her back legs until her blunt claws found purchase against the side of the pool and she managed to push the rest of herself out. She collapsed, gasping for breath. “Dovefeather,” she panted, her cheek pressed to the ground. “Are you all right?”

The little coyote studied her friend for a time. The cat seemed to be fine, if a bit winded, and Macawi decided that after that little escapade, she needed to go off and rest for a while. Besides, she was starting to see... strange... things in the corners of her vision. She stood on shaky legs, said an uncharacteristically soft goodbye, and trotted away, wondering what she had gotten herself into this time...

[Exit Macawi]


"Speech"

For the first half day or so after emerging from the waters, Macawi will experience nothing out of the ordinary. Then, she will begin to see fleeting shadows out of the corner of her eye. They will pass in and out of her periphery as mere illusions or tricks of the light. Sometimes they will take the form of staggering bodies, and other times they are clouds of void lingering in a far nook of the wall behind her. No matter where she sees them, however, it seems that they are always trying to lead her to Canis. This effect will last until the conclusion of the Eyes quest.