now the eyes of my eyes are opened

Amongst the veils of Frostchant, a frigid wind blew. It carried a dusting of snow, so light upon the zephyr, but compounded greatly once it found stillness against the solid, frozen earth. The treecover was thick in places, but thin in others, and snow found it difficult to penetrate into the depth of the packlands but the wind that whistled down from the top of the mountains left a chill amongst her bones.

After arriving to Frostchant, Olive hadn't seen much of Archon; the sights of him were fleeting here and there, and the woman couldn't help but remember how she had found him in Little Haven: alone & left to his own devices by those who had taken him in. He was a child (though a young one no longer) with no parents, and even though he was strikingly independent, he still required kindness and guidance from an elder. Olive, as distracted as she might have been, could not neglect this role she had subsumed into her own.

However the weather was blustery and obscured her sense of scent. When the most cursory of landsweeps proved unfruitful, the woman easily resorted to calling the boy forth. "@Archon!" the woman sang, hoping the swirling winds would carry her hollow voice to the young man's ears, and draw him closer.

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^^The little gang of misfits had left Little Haven and joined another band of thieves - er, well, Archon wasn’t sure what they were or what type of pack they were, as he had not interacted with anyone from this new pack, but he decided that until proven themselves, they were another band of thieves.

He’d found it strange and a little bizarre, even, that he’d need no one from Frostchant and assumed it’d been as empty and as boring as Little Haven had been and thus, when a fresh layer of snow covered the ground, Archon went to play in it. The snow halted his search for Bam Bam, so he found himself just running and rolling around in the snow until Olive had summoned.

Oh, were they finally leaving?

Archon ran over to Olive with the excited wag of his tail until he noted that Ben Ben was not with her. Surely, they could not leave without him!

“Er, uh, where's Ben Ben?”

^^
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Alas, it seemed the young boy was eager to see her as well, as he was procured easily from the frostbitten, rolling hills. The sight of his multi-hued coat bounding towards her over the snow caused her heart to flutter and quiver for a moment, perhaps not realizing how accustomed she had become to his presence, until his presence was no longer a daily thing. Realizing that she had actually missed Archon with her heart, and not some well-placed sense of loyalty, she began to move towards him in a trotting gait, grinning gaily at the boy in sincere welcome.

He asked about Benry, and inside Olive felt her glow falter, but outwardly it never did. Archon and the cat understood each other in a way that Olive did not; perhaps it was their relative youth, or their gender, but more often than not Olive felt she were the caretaker of the trio — when, honestly, she wanted to be an equal. A friend. "I'm sure he's not far..." the gamine woman answered, turning her head to and fro, knowing the mountain lion to be far too camouflaged for her to scry from the landscape easily. Not wanting to disappoint Archon, she lifted her maw to the wind, and with a twitch of her lips, she released an almost-too-feline chirp to let @benry know he was wanted.

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^^If anyone were to ask the boy why he followed a ghost and a stripeless tiger through from the plains to the mountains, and the great beyond, Archon would smile with that boyish charm and would tell them it’s cus he thought she was pretty.

Archon looked to Olive in the way that a boy would look to his babysitter, so of course, when she realized that she was missing his company, and called for the boy, the boy would drop whatever it was that he was doing and run to her.

Archon wasn’t sure when it would be that he would stop being seen as a child and start being seen as something else… but as long as he was a child, there was no equality between them; just two adoptive parents and their adopted boy… that were also his friends.

But when she called for Ben Ben, Archon grinned and smiled. It was a call that she’d done a number of times before, but just because he was asking about his cat-daddy, didn’t really mean he needed to be summoned - but he’d also been under the impression that they were finally leaving and going someplace else.

But while she was distracted with pretending to be a birb, Archon narrowed his eyes at her and barked once, right before pouncing her into the snow.

^^
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benry was...brooding. he couldn't think of a better term for the haze of gloom that had shrouded his mind of late, turning the static of his mind to a lower, darker frequency. he didn't know what had triggered it, but he knew that he was...disappointed. the collar still remained, despite him being told that it would come off eventually. a few months, perhaps. but it hadn't. he'd already freaked out once, but the uncomfortable tension still remained.

he was idling somewhere nearby — honestly he wasn't even registering where he was — when he heard olive's call. he walked towards her, responding with a half-meow, half-slurred word:“mmwhaa?” striding up to olive, he went to headbutt her lazily, only for archon to batter her with snow. benry swiped back, peeling off the top crust of snow to spray archon with an arc of freezing powder.
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I'm not sure if Olive, Benry and Archon were as enmeshed as they seemed, but I would dare any of them to try to live without the others. They hadn't been family for a long time, but in the several seasons they had been by the others' side, deep bonds had been forged. Olive had many feelings towards these two that ranged from visceral love to mild annoyance, but a deep sense of trust pervaded it all. That trust was simply reinforced, yet another time, when Benry heeded her call within moments. Clearly, he had been nearby.

It shocked her when the wind was unceremoniously taken from her lungs and she was thrown to the ground; and for a second, her eyes opened wide with unreasonable fear! but it was only Archon, and when she inhaled the scent of his pelage so close, she regained her breath and squirmed against his weight and frame uselessly, without real force. "Benry, do your job!!" she cried out, only now it was mock-fear. She continued to 'try' to get away. ""Can't you see i'm being murdered over here?!" Benry might call himself a parole officer, but Olive didn't know what that was, and continually chalked it up to a fancy word for 'bodyguard.' and, being her bodyguard, it was reasonably assumed he had to be apart of any snuggle pile she was.

At long last she finally broke free of her captor and her sudden bed in the snow; she pranced away winningly, flashing a smile that seemed to contraindicate the apparent wounding she had suffered. Remembering that she was murdered, the pale woman limped, dramatically dragging a willowy limb behind her. "and by one of my closest friends, too..." she mourned pitifully before dropping where she was with a light puff of powder, her white pelt woefully obscured by the snow. She lifted her head and narrowed her jade eyes playfully at Archon, verbally plotting her revenge. "I always knew it'd be you," she muttered, before laying back in the snow and awaiting the applause for her practiced theatrics.

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