“You ready yet?” Luna said with an annoyed tone in her voice.
“Almost,” I replied in a sing-song voice.
Luna and I may be twins, but other than our appearances, we have opposite personalities. We both have medium brown hair inherited from our mother, although mine is wavy, which makes me look almost exactly like our mother. Luna's is straight, like our father's hair, and we both have the same deep green eye color of our mother. I am energetic and elated while Luna is more impassive, which often leads us into arguments about something we disagree on.
We both wear the tribal clothing of our clan, but there are minor differences between mine and Luna's. Luna wears the tribal brown pants of our clan, while I wear a dress that cuts off above my knees, and we both wear dark brown boots. Luna wore a dark green tunic with sleeves that reach up to her elbows and flow when she walks. Our clan's tribal patterns of light green, light and dark brown covered the tunic around the neck, chest, and bottom. She also wore two short brown gloves that cut-off at her fingers. I wore a long sleeve v-neck, medium green dress with patterns that differed slightly, and were around the neck, bottom of the sleeves, and bottom of the dress. I, like Luna, wore gloves, but only one on my right hand.
The clothes of our clan are dyed so that they act as a sort of camouflage. The shades of green and brown in our clothing match with the shades of the forest. But camouflage isn’t the only reason why are clothes are the colors they are. When dying our clothing, the designers must use natural dyes that can be made using items in nature such as mud for the color brown and leaves for the greens. The designer will gather these items and mix them in with many other items like water, to get the dye to a desired texture and color. All of our clothes are handmade from scratch, though many items used to make them are imported through a nagual trading system.
Because we have tails that are extensions of our spine, nagual clothes have to be designed specially so that our tails can stick out comfortably and not harm our balance. Since everyone has different sized tails, the clothing must be created specifically to the wearer. Usually the pants are the clothing that are altered specially for our tails, but on occasion the shirt will be too. When a nagual needs a piece of clothing, the designer will measure the areas needed to complete the piece, and go from there. Also, many of the nagual designers are very artistic, and dont like to create the same style and pattern of clothing over and over again, so often there will be a different look for each nagual, like Luna and I.
“OK!” I declared,” I'm all set and ready to go!”
“Good, now lets head out,” Luna replied as she was already walking in the direction of our destination.
Since Himitsu was destroyed in the fire, we no longer have a home. We could live in our house if we wanted to, but we would be accompanied only by our dead clan members, which wasn't pleasant to have to live around. Another reason we have to leave Himitsu is because whoever killed our clan may be after us as well, so we shouldn’t take any chances with staying in the village.So we must head off to find shelter in our destination.
Our destination is a place called Soule Sanctuary. Soule is a village like Himitsu in the sense that it contains residents of a wolf clan, except instead of the gray wolves, its where many of the white wolves live. Soule is located inside of a cave of a giant waterfall appropriately named Howling Falls. The Falls got its name from the humans, who were said to hear wolves howling near them.
There is said to be a secret passage that leads inside the waterfall. The inside of the waterfall is hollow, with only the rock walls and ceiling keeping the it from collapsing. Or so I’ve heard from other traveling nagual that have been there.
We chose Soule as our destination because we have a few childhood friends living there, and its the closest wolf village we know of, being only a three day trip, on foot, away. This may seem like far away to a human, but for a nagual its nothing because a nagual can simply shift and sprint the distance in half that time, or in just a few hours.
Of course, we cant shift during the day, so it would be pretty hard to run at night and then sleep or rest in the day to get there, plus, we weren’t in any real hurry to get there, so we might as well enjoy the scenery of the forest along the way. Luna and I will walk on foot from Himitsu to Soule, which will end up to be quite a tiresome trip, but as long as no danger gets in the way since we have nothing to defend ourselves with, we should be fine, and can only hope for the best.
