5th of Summer, 515 AV
morning
The coyote had been looking for the girl. The one that had been smiling and dancing, going around and around, though he still didn't know where he knew that from. The one that had fallen into the river.
It had been some days since he'd seen her, and he had that feeling in his belly that told him to look, to find, to make sure she was okay. To make sure she was good now.
He picked up her trail outside the city. First he had gone to the riverside where he had dragged her out, knowing that the mud would have held some fading trace of her scent. He could have gone other places, but he had already been outside the city, and the riverside was best, he thought. It was difficult to find her smell in the mud and fish and reeds, but he picked up something that he thought was her: a sort of earthy, rocky scent, one that sparked in his nose like the flash of what the human-forms called glass. He followed along the ground, going the way they had gone when he had helped her walk, and she had fallen, and he had gone to get help. Then the scent lead in through the gates.
After that he followed it back and forth. Following a smell in the city could be harder than outside, where everything was far apart. Within the big walls all the smells mixed together. There were many many trails by the same people, some old, some new. Sometimes other people's scents clung like pollen to the wrong person, if they had been where the one lived or worked or if they had been near them. He could smell the girl here and there, and followed her trails around, up stairs and down stairs, into this building and out another. Finally he picked up something fresh.
Here the coyote stepped into a side-road and shifted, dropping the pants from his mouth and pulling them on. This latest trail was strong enough that he would be able to follow it even with his human nose; it was from not very long ago at all. Kyo didn't understand the human-form way of calling time
--something having to do with the loud bells that rang within the city-- but he understood time from scents. This one was from after the sun had gone up in the sky. He turned and followed it.
Eventually he found her, and was surprised by what he saw-- or, more like, by what he had not seen before. He had not looked at her the last time, really looked, because he had been so frightened that she was too badly hurt. Now he noticed the little things, which helped form a more complete thought of who she was in his head, something that combined with her scent to say who she was: the strong arms and build, the strange two-color eyes, the marks scarring her hands. She looked okay, strong he thought, good. He was glad. If he had still been in coyote-form he would have wagged his tail.
Even after all this time in the city, listening to the human-forms speak, the word for their greetings slipped from his mind. Instead he jogged up to her, smiling widely, and said, "Friend!" He wanted to touch her, to touch her hand like the ones did, to shake, just so that he might be near, might feel that yes, she was strong and healthy. He didn't, but he wanted to very badly. It was another way of making sure she was still here. Still living, and well.
"I want to know," he said, making his best effort to speak clearly now that he knew how important words could be. He had spent long nights trying to remember the sounds and shapes, trying to form them with his mouth. Some of the words had come back, but most of them were ones that the Akalak in the blue city did not seem to understand very well. He trilled off some of those now, light, flowing-rolling words that sounded much like what was called singing, "How are you?"
In his mind these words looked different than the usual ones he spoke, though he didn't know why. They were longer, smoother. 'How are you' was not like 'how are you' in the usual words. When he said it now, it had one exact meaning-- like 'how' {polite/caring/asking-about-person}, 'are' {person's-wellness/person's-state-of-being}, 'you' {anxious/hope-person-is-well}. The other kind left out much of that, leaving the question as something more broad, so that much of it was lost, gone.
But, knowing that she probably did not understand --something that confused him, because if even he knew the words then shouldn't other people know them too?-- he continued on in the plain-language. "I'm interest in you... you good, yes? You rib, no hurts? I worry for you. I come to see." After having thought about it for a while now, he knew his words were not right and he could almost see where, how some were missing, probably a lot. He was resolved to pay close attention to try to figure out how to put his speaking together. To ask about words, if he could figure out how.
