He thought then to himself that this woman regarded him as the other humans did, as if he were strange and did not quite belong. He wasn't sure if he wanted to, and the reactions of the others around him didn't push him towards wanting to join their society. He remained apart. Perhaps one day he would find others like him, other outcasts and ill-fitting people who did not feel fully comfortable in this place, in this skin, as if he were a visitor in a hotel bed instead of his own, and all of the strange new things , the lumps in odd places that just did not quite feel like home.
He wrinkled his nose, trying to get the distaste of her words out of his airway. It did not seem right, it did not fit right, and it did not sit well in his soul or what he knew of divinity and of existing himself. None of it. That even she didn't know what it was, that society didn't know. And all she knew was the many traditions. If this place was found recently, oral traditions wouldn't help what the humans had never bothered to try to find. He might have asked about them otherwise, but the place being found in an earthquake told him all she had was useless.
He felt no need to answer her question. She already knew he was foreign, and what he would say next, not knowing the human customs enough to ask would further reinforce it. "If you wish to understand what this place is, there are three ways. One is to simply wait and observe and let the place tell you. But few are good at listening or waiting for a task that may take a lifetime of devotion to master the simplest detail of what this place is. ", he looked at her through the corner of his eye. Not the submissive gesture meant to look and not challenge, but rather that it wasn't worth turning his head to casually check what his limited ears and nose had already told him - that she had moved away from him more. "I sense that route is not one that fits you well.", she had not been able to stand still for the span of a few sentences, much less the many years, if not all of them to divine the quiet secrets this place held. "The second is to find a place where the accounting of this place is recorded. The third is to find a one who might tell the oral traditions that have been lost, it's place and purpose among the stories, too, that are absent. ", he remained quiet for a while. "Is there one among you who has lived many more generations than society? Perhaps one who has been outcast for not adapting to modern ways, tales, and traditions.", he said nothing of the species of such a being. If humans lived generations longer than wolves, perhaps there was a being that naturally had already lived generations of humans.
He considered whether he should be silent, now, and try to listen to the trees and birds and snow, but he knew that such a gesture would be futile with her here, rude to her by human custom of much talking, and his demise with The Long Dark approaching. He shook his head with his own hypocrisy, speaking of a thing that he would not do.
Or would he... ?
He looked at her now with a silent, unspoken question written in his eyebrows.
