Awaken, my strawberry-boy.

 

The crackling of ember and the cheers and laughter are what ring through his head while he slumbers. His home, his family, his best friends. They tell stories of their past, their present, and someday even their future. But Sabriel is sleeping. His eyes--his body; his mind--are heavy.

A painful sting pierces through his head. Sabriel groans, rolling over onto his side in an attempt to ignore it. The ringing begins to rise, rise, rise, to a teeth-grating wail, until it softens. From its peak, it's precipice, it subsides, replaced by an angelic voice. Perhaps from the heavens.

“Awaken, my strawberry-boy,” she says. “Awaken, so that you may start anew.” And he's frightened, for he does not know who this mystery woman is. He voices his concern, his worry: “Who are you?” Sabriel calls. His eyelids feel stuck. They won't open. He begins to thrash.

He is but a boy, after all.

“Where am I?”
...
“Someplace new.”

And then his sage-green eyes open, and he jolts up. His pelt--his pelt?--feels cold. Just slightly slicked with the sweat that comes with a bad dream. A shiver runs through his fur--his fur?--as Sabriel looks around. Looks down. Down at his paws. The claws, the rosy hue. And his eyes widen, even more so then before.

Where... am I?

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A strange chill ran up his spine. The sight was harrowing, an eerie familiarity that began as if it were rehearsed. It was a sequence of events that jarred him no matter how many times he had been a witness to its occurrence or knew of its happening. Before him was just a boy. Possibly not even a year old yet as he lay in the grass looking this way and that, no wonder trying to make sense of it all.

He couldn’t blame him, couldn’t bring himself to ignore the painful confusion he had felt himself that first day and even the weeks that followed. Confusion he could still feel clinging to his back like an angry leach as it writhed against his spine. It reminded himself of its existence now and again, twitching at just the right moment to elicit more questions than he could ever hope to have answers for. It was just another thing, another trinket in the satchel of many that did not, could not sit right with him.

A somewhat sad smile pulled his lips in the smallest way as he glanced over the boy. He didn’t look wounded anywhere, despite the unorthodox thrashing, his body appeared perfectly fine on the outside. Large paws swept through the carpet of emerald greenery, their movements quiet despite the amount of weight they served to support. “Are you alright?” He said the only thing he could think of, the most basic question while the boy’s mind presumably swam with unrelenting questions and doubts. Beck’s tail flicked behind him, a subtle twitch as he waited at a respectable distance for the newcomer to respond.

@Sabriel
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A stranger. He smells them before he sees them, and the hair on his nape and his spine raises; as does his hackles along. Friend... or foe? His dark fur proved to be good camouflage against the slowly rising sun. Sabriel had to whip his head around to get his eyes on the newcomer, trying to find the voice.

Ah. There he was. Behemoth in stature, opposed to the quaint size of a soon-to-be yearling. His expression held an empathy of some sort. He wasn't too close, nor to far. Sabriel could feel himself subconsciously begin to relax, though still, his eyes remained creased, ears pricked and ready in case he needed to turn around and bolt. “I'm OK,” he lied.

The lad turned his head, examining flowers underfoot and the canopy of trees overhead. Light was crawling up the sky. This place would be bright and vibrant soon. Maybe it would be worth it to stay a while... if he found some company, that is. “Where am I, though?” His gaze returns back to the stranger. The man whose name he doesn't even know.

Right.

“--And who are you?”

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Only once before had he been the first to arrive at the scene of - Whatever what just happened was to be called, he didn’t know. There seemed to be no words upon his tongue that would appropriately place such a thing, a happening he could not even come to barely understand. It wasn’t that he had been thick of mind, but the essence of it all, the very nature was of something that most would naturally refer to as an impossibility. An illusion. Every night he fell asleep he half expected to wake up somewhere else, his time in this place nothing more than a dream that would quickly fade once his eyes had opened elsewhere. However the longer he dwelled on it, what became in his assumed reality was a the opposite. Memories, a former life amounting to no more than a soft echo.

Beck found himself admitting that he was not the best company at a time such as this. Vienne would have been better. At least she had some answers, but even that didn’t quell the debates waging wars within him. She had been born of this land and still her eyes held questions of their own. He straightened himself, trying to appear friendly above the weighty concerns. Shrugging at the boy’s question, his smile pulled up a centimeter more. “Somewhere… else.” The man took another step before he sat himself onto the flowered ground, tail splaying loosely around him across the violet blooms. “This place in particular is - sundance grove.” Searching the early memories of his arrival, one eye narrowed beneath the furrowing of his forehead as he struggled to repeat what the ivory girl had told him.

Inching over the splaying branches above, Beck smoothed his eyes down the slender spindles that cradled rays of sunlight before they returned to the boy. “My name is Beck.” His gaze softened. “It’s alright to be confused. The same thing that’s happening to you now happened to me a few weeks ago. It has happened to others to. I don’t know why or how, but…” Words knotted like strings on his tongue, the explanation he hoped to meander through escaping him the moment he heard what was born of his own tongue. It sounded insane. He sounded insane. Releasing the words to blow adrift in the wind, he relinquished the attempt. Whatever the young man was to come to believe or deny about his existence in this realm was only something for he himself to contend with.

@Sabriel

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Sundance grove, the man confirms. It makes sense, this place surely does have a 'sundance' vibe about it. He listens as Beck explains. How the phenomenon he just experienced is a situation everyone has been through, apparently. Even Beck himself. “Right...”

“Well, nice to meet you, Beck. I'm...” What's his name again? The word lingers on his tongue. S-something. S, s, s. “--Sabriel.” The boy settles. Whether that's his name or not is something that he himself is not entirely sure of just yet. What he is sure of, though, is that he is hungry, thirsty, and he wants to get back home.

Please, let there be a way to get back home.

In the meantime... “You wouldn't happen to know of any lakes, would you? Or a place someone could get... uh... a bite...?” He seems to recall a sliver of a memory; a shift every now and then. From a creature, up-right and fleshy, to what he is now. A beast; a canine, a wolf. Maybe he'd retained something on how to use these incredibly pointy teeth...

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