ORIGIN

For: Aza'zel, Beau, Clover (follow whatever order you guys prefer)

Being clean was preferable to being dirty. It was important to be clean and the water was plenty safe. Plus, after being clean there were some... comforting things that made it not so cold.

"Beau," he whispered, hunched down to peer into the retriever's eyes. Saudade was already quite tall, but his skinniness seemed even more comical next to the happily plump dog pup. "Aza needs help - but shh." He leaned in, wrapping a paw around his companion and drawing him closer. "You must be very quiet." Sticking his face alongside the other child's he direcred both their snouts to point in the direction of the Boneking, a little mischief in the wolf's eyes and a little white lie on his tongue.

But it wasn't his fault that Beau was easy to... he wasn't sure the word, but manipulate probably was it. Despite having been born more silent than not and remaining so for most of his time... When the wolf gained the confidence to speak clearly, he began to. And he spoke pretty well for a boy his age, even if he didn't understand many fundamentals about life and living yet.

"If Aza is dirty a big, scary monster will come and, and eat him!" He whispered with exasperation. "You don't want that... Do you? So this is what we gonna do..."

The Plan was simple.

And it began with a wish...

// roll

Saudade waited until the ave seemed to be distracted with a perfectly luscious bone.

And then he wished. A little wicked grin was on his lips as he felt himself becoming more acquainted with his wishes - with the darker side of things. Searching for the proper feeling he gently wrapped Aza'zel in a shroud, pulling the shadows from the corners and thickening them around his friend and leader.

This was Step One.

Step Two?

Cocking a brow at Beau expectantly, he waited for the yellow lump to do thread heavy lifting.

She had decided to explore outside of her comfortable green and inky home to see what laid in store for her, what mysteries to uncover, what new stories to be found. Thus far it lead it to a very desolate and creepy room, at least to her. bones, bones, bones, everywhere, evidence of the dead and long since dying littered the floor, and where there weren't any bones, there was more ink. Every step she took to reach the delightful ink crunched and snapped beneath her hoofs and it set her fur on edge and made her tense. She had no evidence to the contrary that something unsavory might find her here, but still, she felt like eyes were on her back. It was incredibly unsettling.

But she made it to the clear and wonderful ink(not that was as inky as it appeared to be at her home, for that was dark and murky), and saw the part of her she had left behind when she awoke staring back at her in the ink. She had decided, at one point, to call the part of her her dreams, for even when she had slept on the way here, the sweet whispers she had so enjoyed in her shell were silent.

So she enjoyed looking at her dreams, turning her head this way and that, dipping her hoof into the ink to create ripples and destroy her dreams, if only for a little while. They always came back, and she found it endlessly amusing. At least her dreams hadn't left her entirely, she mused.

Beau’s head shot up when his new friend Saudade came over to him. His tail immediately began thumping behind him in joy. He liked his new friends. They were friendly. The way friends ought to be. But the words the wolf spoke upset poor gentle Beau. Aza was gonna get eaten by a scary monster if he was dirty?? Beau was absolutely horrified at the idea, and whimpered sadly. He didn’t want his first ever friend to get eaten! That would be sad and then he’d never have anyone to throw him bones for him to fetch anymore! What would he do then?

He watched with big, curious eyes as a shroud of darkness was wrapped around his birdie friend, who didn’t seem to notice. Then he very quietly, as Saudade had told him to be, snuck over to him. He felt sort of bad for doing this sneakily, but he would rather sneak around then let his friend get eaten. He wasn’t entirely sure what he was supposed to do, so he just sort of… very slowly attempted to put his mouth over the bird’s leg or something…

//roll attempt

But Beau, being the big slobbery klutz that he was somehow completely failed at this task. He tipped over too far in his attempt to very slowly grab onto Aza’s leg and ended up face-planting into the bird’s feathered rear end. They both went toppling over and Beau lay sprawled out on the ground, legs spread wide. He looked up and shook his head, wondering what had just happened. Then he realized he had just failed at his mission! Quickly, he scrambled to his paws, whispering, “Shhhh! I’s still get Aza for bath!” He wasn’t really sure who he was talking to, except maybe himself, but his words were not helping with the stealth mission at all. Oh, wouldn’t Sau be so proud of him!

He thought he gave Beau the easiest job in the book. Okay, maybe the easiest would have been to sit there and just look pretty, but that wasn't even helping! Saudade had thought his friend could manage the grabbing and the dragging.

Saudade was sorely mistaken.

Internally the wolf groaned. Externally he tilted his head back and looked at the cave roof. Blinking he mouthed words to whatever divine rock that created him. The words were likely something along the lines of: 'why me' or 'how?' - after all, how could snatching an ave so engrossed in his bones and blind to everything else, thanks to a little wishing on his own part, be so difficult?

Why did he have to do everything himself?

But his irritation at the failure of his friend couldn't be allowed to fester or grow. Heaving a deep breath, Saudade shouldered some of the blame, too. Maybe Beau just wasn't ready for being sly. Yet. He'd need some practice. And if anyone was able to teach Beau it'd have to be one of the Bonebound. Most of them were crafty critters. The yellow retriever was just... an exception.

Stalking forward, Saudade prepared to give Beau a paw.

She had heard the squawking and crashing from atop the nearby tiny hill (how could she not) and had long since turned to try and see what was causing all the ruckus. Before she could take more than a few steps in its direction, down came a giant, tumbling shroud of pitch black that made all of her her fur bristle and stand on end, and she quickly scrambling back to avoid getting hit by it. She hastily looked around with her good eye, but either good cover escaped her bad vision, or there was simply none around. She ended up in something like a crouching position, ready to run or defend herself.

A nervous series of thoughts entered her mind; had the dark come to find her? Was it mad for actively avoiding it? It had disturbed her dream in the ink, and she couldn't even see it, now.

And it was making this really disturbing humming sound that set her teeth on edge. It went away quickly enough, but it was like the dark was trying to speak, almost, and it sent multiple shivers or terror down her back.

Taking long, deep breaths, she did the only thing she could do; she called that tentative thread in her to try and dispel the dark.

Edit for spell

Trying to call the light to her was much more difficult that it was last time. Her nerves were shot and this big dark thrashing thing had come toward her and was making this offsetting sound, but she managed to take a deep breath, then another, then a third, and call forth a really rather pathetic glow. It didn't help much - all she could see was...well, actually, she had no idea what she was looking at. The bunch of things were long and kind of reddish(she had no idea) and really rather dirty. (Later she would see them as Aza's tailfeathers.)

Was...was there a friend in there? Like what happened with Wolf when everything disappeared?

Well...as much as she didn't want to, there was only one way to find out. She walked into the dark enough that her head was obscured by the shroud of pitch, and she could see absolutely nothing. But it was okay, she kept her eyes completely shut and knew this was only temporary even though her shoulder muscles and legs were bunched tight and anxious, her stomach was all coiled in knots, and her body was trying to tell her to run.

She moved her head this way and that, till her nose nuzzled against something really soft and dirty and oh, for the love of dreams it smelled really really bad, and she made all sorts of disgusted sounds and fell back before her lunch of leafy greens threatened to come back up.

She ended up falling on her rear back into the clear ink, rubbing her nose with her hooves. By all that was pretty, that was foul.

Beau had honestly no idea what was even happening at this point. He may have been a natural-born predator (at least physically), but he was no cat. He couldn’t see in the dark, and he didn’t have Light Magic like Saudade. So he was just about as trapped as Aza, in truth, though he didn’t know it until he attempted to follow the bird’s scent and ended up stumbling all over himself and following the bird’s trail directly into the water with a loud splash! He felt Aza’s body next to this, and his big tail began to thump in joy. So he had gotten him into the water! Oh, wonderful! But… now what?

He didn’t see Sau coming forward to help, but his eyes did pick up some sort of very faint glowing from… somewhere. Momentarily forgetting about his mission, he lifted himself back up onto his paws and squinted through the dark. (Why was it so dark, anyways? He was still confused about that!) Beau, unfortunately, couldn’t really tell what was making the glow. The Dark and Light were sort of cancelling each other out, so all he saw through the inky black was little shimmers here and there. Oh well!

Incredibly confused, she peered at the two completely new creatures in front of her, one made entirely of fluff, apparently called a Beau, who was incredibly slobbery and very happy, and then... this...

Everything about what she believed she had sniffed was foreign to everything she'd seen thus far. Its nose was wrong and sharp, its head was tiny and ruffled with what was definitely not fur, it didn't have four legs like everything she'd seen so far possessed, and the feet it did have were strange and very...just very wrong. They should either be paws or hooves, and instead they were scraggly and taloned. And those things that should be legs that were instead spread out and shaken and extended an amazing length were just so utterly confusing that she couldn't even form a theory for where it all came from.

But....the creature seemed polite enough, even though it smelled absolutely horrible, so she decided not to bolt away from it immediately. Her pathetic glow faded away while she was lost in her observations.

It looked up to the little hill and said the name Saudade, and she wondered what the creature Saudade would look like. There was the Beau(whom she rather liked, for its expression was so happy and carefree that she couldn't resist liking the Beau), the Vazi, the Wolf friend, the Tamelyn and the Nyx, and something called duikers that was mentioned briefly that she had no idea about, all vastly different and yet similar in their own ways.

And then she got sprayed with water by the really weird creature and she turned to look at it again, and saw it grow completely and utterly horrified at something, perhaps at what the Saudade was planning. Was the Saudade that horrible? Was it a creature like itself?

She was excited to see where all this would go.