change your heart or die ▽ The wind felt like teeth as it burned through his fur in places, occasionally delivering with it the spray of sea mist. Damp, standing on a ledge overlooking roiling waves, shuddering in his shoulders, his adolescent faux hawk struck out in haphazard streaks – Finnulf was a cinematic portrait of dramatic introspection. This was the ocean that had raised him (for he did feel, at 10 months, that he was grown). He wondered where, as the waves snapped at the slick stone under him, Vellen was in all that angry stormwater. The sky, being overcast, poured a dramatic light over the shoreline. Finn glanced down the black sands, toward the distant cove. It was as close as he could get. Tension in his chest, he waited, pulling his eyes back out to the sea like a monk at vigil. Even in his brooding, there was a certain resolve that hardened his jaw. It sat on his brow, at the corner of his eyes. It looked almost mature. It was clear he had some sort of goal and he was intent to see it through. His family was in disarray. His family meaning his mother, and his siblings. The Sigrun clan, as it were, had all but abandoned them in his mind. Finn was not certain just what he felt at this point. To be sure, he wasn’t taking his family’s exile from the cove...well. None of them were, it seemed. His mother held up in the mountains to recover, and that was fine. It just felt so pitiful. He had been searching for Emrik to no avail. He felt like he had betrayed Cirilla somehow, with his distance. The overwhelming drive to fix everything was like a curse in his bones. But here he was, at the last resort, the last ditch effort, his ace-in-the hole. He glanced back down the shoreline, despite himself, hopeful until he slapped it back down. The Great Him. The father lord. Every five minutes he felt like an idiot. But still he stayed, and waited. He jerked his eyes back to the sea, cussing at himself in Icelandic through clenched teeth. @Leviathan

He pads the black sands of Stygian shore with uncanny familiarity as he headed back to the Cay with his modest haul; a fish roughly the length of his forearm. It was an ocean trout, speckled in color with a gaping yellow mouth. The flat black of the sands ahead of him is broken by a set of footprints leading to a silhouette facing the sea. At first, it seemed like an adult man, but as he got closer (at first with the intention of just passing by, until he saw who it was), he realized it was a boy. It was his boy!

The revelation that he was a Father now had rocked him. Not as much that such a thing was possible, but the fact that Ulla had hid them from Levi for so long. Truthfully, he had been considering kidnapping the boy and his sister to raise him into a proper pirate, but before he could plan anything in earnest the place they lived had been overtaken and he had no idea where they had left to. He hated the idea of being an absent father, and the more it felt their mother kept them away from their true Blankmont blood, the more he began to concoct his plan to free his children from a life of politics and prides.

Yet, he is now here and Leviathan can't help but wonder if he was here for him, driven by the same thread of fate and freedom that had once driven Levi to piracy.

His fish is discarded in the sand beside him as Leviathan nears @Finnulf. Was he always so serious? How in the world did such a stern lad come from his seed? Maybe something had happened? The words he uses are unfamiliar to the pirate, but the energy behind them was all too familiar. "Fin." He greets with a grin. Embarrassingly, he had forgotten his kid's full name, remembering only that it started with Fin. The look on his face is one of mirth, he is happy to see his son here. Weariness is there too lingering in his pink eyes that glance over the boy, who even younger than a year was nearly his height already. "Who ye mutterin' about?"

Art by Ale-Tie

change your heart or die ▽ When someone came, it was from behind. Finn twisted around in a jerking motion and met the face of his father with a wild bucking in his heart despite himself. His father said his name, and a grin erupted on the adolescent’s face. The man, still mostly a stranger despite the way he looked like an older, stronger version of Finnulf’s own reflections in many ways (minus the milkfoam splash of color that marred his own, a defect Finnulf was beginning to develop a complex about). For most of his life he had for some reason never wondered about the existence of his father. Ulla, Cirilla, and Emrik had been enough. Even beyond them, his aunts and uncles, and the Cove’s healer – Nebula – had been like a web of love which kept him stable. He wanted for nothing but things to be curious about, things to hunt, ways to annoy his siblings. Even during the mist’s occupation, it seemed like nothing could touch him that he didn’t invite in on his own volition – misguided or not. It had been a good life, even allowing for adventure. It all drained away when the mist did, as if spirited to the monstrous dimension from which the mist came. Of course he had from time to time been curious about the concept of father. He remembered when Ransom had joined their pride. His immense size and strength had been mesmerizing, even as Finnulf only felt wariness. Other men outside his family had only ever elicited suspicion. But not Leviathan. Even after the moment on the beach where he’d first met his own father and didn’t even know it. But since the moment he’d learned the truth, it had been like a new world of possibilities burst open on his head without warning. Like someone had cracked an egg over his ears. He had gone his whole life not knowing he should know something. Missing something he didn’t know was gone. Perhaps Leviathan could have kept the world from imploding. Even now, his hesitation crept in. Uncertainty. What if this was a mistake? But Leviathan looked...genuinely happy. The grin on Finnulf’s face was the first that had been there in a month. "Zahir. But I don’t hate him. I’d like to hang his balls on a tree." He added the last bit with a shrug of his shoulder as if it clarified something important. He felt like he was oversharing, he glanced back at the fish Levi had dropped. How could someone go about daily life like the world hadn’t been destroyed? "He took the cove from my family, my móður was hurt. My bróðir is missing. Everything’s shit." His green eyes narrowed as if to block a glare from the sun. "Did you know?" @Leviathan

Like father like son, the two merle lions stood there grinning dumbly at each other, Leviathan's own grin swelled by the fact that @Finnulf seemed just as happy to see him here too. It emboldens him to swoop in closer and sit shoulder to shoulder with him so that they could watch the ocean lap at their toes together.

He listens as he speaks, filling in some gaps for Leviathan about what had happened to the cove. "No' really. Jus' that when I went back fer you and yer sister you were gone; border piss smelled different. Is your sister okay?" He hadn't needed to linger close to know what happened, it was the way of things for priders. Ulla was tough but there was always tougher and needier.

"If it weren't Zahir, woulda been someone else eventually." Levi was a man for hard truths, and it seems like this was Finnulf's first encounter with what the ambition to rule really costs. "Power never lasts, and it's always paid fer in blood."

Art by Ale-Tie

change your heart or die ▽ He watches with something almost like awe as Leviathan comes to sit next to him, close enough to touch. There seemed to be some sort of rules in the universe that he hadn’t realized even existed. There are mothers and fathers. They both love you. He hasn’t even had the time to fully reflect on the fact that he was deprived of that for most of his life, so far. He glances sideways at Leviathan, his brow quirked, a wonder tentatively perched on his face. "You...came for us?" He tastes the words, blinks and then looks out to the ocean as if it might dispel the tension in his chest. Leviathan had wanted to retrieve them, take them away. This realization seemed to change things, somehow. Even if it was too late. He is then reminded he hasn’t really spoken or interacted with his sister much since their expulsion from the cove. Too absorbed in his own brooding. "Ciri is...okay. I...haven't talked to her much." He can't help but divulge this to his father. Guilt swells in his gut, thick and heavy like a rock sinking in to convict him of being the worst brother. "We just miss our home." He assumed Ciri missed the cove just like he did, but of course he couldn’t be sure without speaking to him. He felt worse and worse about things the more he reflected on them. How did everything get so bad, so fast? He listens to his father’s polemic, blunt and simple as it was, like a gulp of water in the desert. Like anything that man said might steady the disjointed earth. It was a hard truth, but it was simple in a way. Power always changes.. It never stays the same, never lasts. It is always paid in blood. Finnulf took in these words like the first taste of meat after losing milk-teeth. Like they made him older. "Then it will happen to him, too." He stated, not a question. It was a pleasing, wicked little thought that brought him comfort. He hoped he could be there to watch it one day. "What…do you do, then? Where do you live? I mean...when they take your home?" He asked, trying not to sound cautious. If power was unreliable, then how could he save his family? To give them something to live for again? @Leviathan