ORIGIN

As soon as beak met the cartilage of an ear, Eythan let go and flapped his muddy wings. Landing in the muck with a rather loud plop! the gryphon puffed out his chest. "Yes, that was a good match---!" In the midst of his pride, he had perked his ears right up and left them wide-open to assault; this was an opportunity that Sergei took without hesitation.

"Tha---" he started, lifting a single talon. No, it wasn't worth contesting. He smoothed down his feathers and simply nodded, plodding over to the stream. "Yeah, guess it is a tie. Three for three." Eythan settled down in a deeper section of the waters, immediately setting to bathe himself much like a bird does: by shaking out his wings and splashing water everywhere.

Eythan rolled once or twice in the water, dunking his head under in order to get every bit of himself drenched. As he preened away, the gryphon kept his ears proverbially open. "It was good practice, yeah. Dunno about fighting being good to actually do," he chirped, pausing to nibble at the quill of one of his coverts.

"Nah, I live in Canis with a couple of others. Room full of bones? Ominous, dreary, kind of horrible?" Why did he live there, actually?

The thickly accented bear had faded somewhat to the back of Eythan's mind as he further ruffled his feathers and cleaned himself. It'd take some doing, but eventually his white fur would be clean and pristine again. The gryphon wasn't vain, by any means at all --- it was just the fact that water and mud made him feel clunky, inflexible. Besides, better to clean up before it dried and caked onto him, hm?

Rounded ears flickered forward, bright eyes widened in slight curiosity as Sergei mentioned actually coming from Canis. "That's pretty fuckin' neat," Eythan nodded, before staring down rather aghast at the halved fish that had been lobbed his way. "There aren't that many hatches in Canis; somethin' about being so damn far from the core or some shit. I don't get magic that much," he mused aloud, mostly to himself; his friend didn't seem to be too socially adept.

Next came the mention of some large cave with a lot of water--- "Fornax?" Eythan settled for what bathing he had already done, crouching down to delicately take the fish tail into his beak and move to the drier bank. He shook himself, head-to-tail, flaring out his wings and sending river-spray all over the place. Somewhat dry, the gryphon plonked down and set to picking off a decent chunk of fish. "My sister lives there, last I knew. She kind of looks like me but without front legs and blue."

The resemblance was striking.

"I don't know any other places with rivers other than the Core, but, uh... the bank's pretty steep and dangerous, y'know? There's some swamp room around here, too." But apparently that place was full of fucking sentient rocks bent on beating your asshole in. Yay.

Eythan, in a rather undignified way, took the fish into his beak and choked the whole thing down, giving up getting a normal piece of it and munching on it.

Eythan coughed slightly on the literal tail end of the fish, not too chuffed by how the fins tickled his throat. Once he was done hacking like he was about to pass a hairball, the gryphon blinked. "Uh, there's a tunnel that's basically covered in ice and real fuckin' cold. You can get to the swamp-room or the Core through there. The swamp smells really wet and kind of muddy. Core's just kind of very bright and glowy." He paused to cough again, swallowing. "You can't fuckin' miss it, dude."

Sergei hadn't seen the blue wyvern, which wasn't exactly out of the ordinary. "That place is fuckin' huge and she likes to swim around, for some reason." Why was quite literally beyond Eythan's understanding.