He was almost tempted to walk around the marsh. The lion lifted his head slightly to peer out over the horizon, noting how it stretched on for a long while before reaching the end of the glistening water. Gabriel let out a snort as he took his first step into the splashes of water. It churned around his ankles as he pressed forward, narrowing his gaze to try and protect his eyes from the raging glare of the daytime sun.
He had gotten carried away in his hunting. One failure after another, Gabriel kept pushing himself to try again only for each meal to slip out of his clutches. By the time he found a scavenged zebra corpse, the sun was already lifting up over the hills in the distance. As he felt the gushing wetness of his paws, Gabriel wished he had hunkered down and slept anyway. Traveling in the light never ended well.
all she knows is that she's a princess. not in the literal sense, because her family was of the basic, commoner sort, but because it was what her father called her—moreso than her name, to a point that she may have forgotten that she was calanthe if not for her mother. the naive child has been separated from them, and that is most worrisome because she is the sort to be easily lost. (for lost is what she is now) ;; soon to be found, albeit not by those she sought. fearful, her folded ears crept close to her skull and shoulders closer still, a tremble beginning in her toes and rising up each pale limb, red eyes flickering with paranoia as she crept through these unfamiliar lands. the ground was wet in an unfamiliar way, though not necessarily disdained: generally, calanthe was open to new experiences—when she had the support of her family at her back. whimpering lowly, the youth lifted each paw daintily as she waded through the marshes, tail curling high to avoid dragging through the damp.
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he is easy to spot. a bleak, dark figure up ahead that immediately brings the girl to a halt, wide eyes misting over with a weary sort of fear and exhaustion as she stares at the lion from afar. a whine slips out unbidden, the petulant sort of noise one would usually make at being denied something they wished for, the kind that makes the girl hold a mucky white paw to her lips with dismay, praying that against the odds the figure hadn't seen her.
Even as he considered his own misfortune with acute displeasure, he managed to pick up the sound of another creature. Gabriel snapped his attention over his shoulder as he looked around wildly to try and figure out what had made the sound, muscles tensing in preparation for an attack. His gaze of strawberry eventually found its way to the figure of a young lioness--or, was that a wild dog? He stared with a furrowed brow and a somewhat flat expression to try and make sense of her ears.
"Your ears--why do they hang like that?" He called out to her with his curiosity piqued. She smelled of youth and fear, telling the older lion that he had nothing to be worried about if she was his opponent. He flexed his curved claws into the muddy sands beneath him as he desperately tried to ignore the uncomfortable sensation of wetness, deciding that someone like him should not be so bothered by this. He decided that he was not bothered by it with a wince.
he'd definitely heard her. her cropped ears pulled backwards warily and then the girl herself took a frightened step backward as well. raspberry eyes flickered this way and that, searching nervously for an escape route, when a masculine voice called out—with words calanthe had far from expected. her jaw gaped, she floundered, and then shut it again, skull twisting to peer at him quizzically. her– her ears? it took a few silent attempts of opening and shutting her mouth before she managed any semblance of a reply, dirty paw returning to the wet marshland, “ i— sorry? " she couldn't help but be a little offended, assuming he meant something by it since his ears were very unlike her own. put out, the girl shuffled her paws uncomfortably, lips curling downward and tail dropping to trail in the damp.
[break][break]“ thats– they're my ears? “ she eventually managed to huff, immediately anxious for having replied so bluntly. her ears had always sat like this, and though memory often failed to recall such details as those you saw every day, she was pretty sure her daddy's were the same. there was a brief moment when she debated throwing the same question back at the dark lion, asking why his ears were round like that, but callie wasn't bold enough for that sort of thing. at least she knew that if he wasn't familiar with ears like hers, there'd be no use in asking if he'd seen her parents. she wilts a little at the thought, realising her luck was continuing to wane.
He thought she appeared to be a foreigner. Gabriel flared his nostrils in a snort of observation while she struggled to respond to him, assuming that this meant she did not understand his (very straight-forward, he thought,) question in the first place. While he struggled to tolerate each moment spent under the glaring heat of the sun against the shadowy tones of his back, he was determined to figure out why this strange creature appeared to be a lion and yet not. Her stuttering reply finally told him that she understood him just fine.
"Alright, alright, I don't mean any harm in it. It's just that lions don't have ears like that. And, you are a lion, right?" He posed the question with a quirked brow as he called out to the lioness in the distance. He thought that explaining his own reasoning behind the prying questions would allow her to see what reasonable inquiries they were.
lions don't have ears like that. the words bite deep in a way they have no business doing, her cropped ears angling backwards with blatant upset. cherry eyes fill with water too easily, and the princess of a girl bites at the inside of her cheek and looks away from the mean brute to blink the tears away. he certainly didn't look like nothing she'd ever seen either, but calanthe wasn't running her mouth off with mean questions about why he looked the way he did. “ lions don't have fur like that either. " —until she did. she said it petulantly, the words biting out against her good-hearted will, the sort of harshness that only ever let itself out when driven to a tantrum. she wasn't used to being prodded like this, and least so when she was tired and lost and hungry.
[break][break]“ i'm as much lion as you are, " she ends up saying anyway, red eyes hard like rubies as she stares at the charcoal male, shifting her weight slightly while lips twisted to a firm line. more of a lion, she could almost hear daddy say, and her chest throbbed: aching for the love of her parents, for their tender words and caring ways. this land didn't leave callie with a lot by mean of hope. she merely hoped that this lion would find a better topic, or perhaps leave her be. (but as much as she disliked how he was talking to her, a furious part of her admitted that it eased the fraying pieces of her sanity, where loneliness had cut)
