Several things of note in Tanglewood:
-The library, full of books she couldn't read, words she couldn't say; frankly depressing, to be honest.
-The town; ramshackle, like it was put together from a dreg heap, junk shacks mixed with poorly preserved houses - but she didn't exactly have anything to compare it to. If anything, her only thoughts were that it was ingenious to build protections like this. A truly novel idea.
-The bunker, which she had not dared enter, if only because the very idea of being stuck in a bunch of metal hallways felt much too similar to being stuck in a crab cage.

These were the observations she made on her first day around Tanglewood, the strangely desolate land of abandoned houses and buildings meshed with the green verdant beauty of natural growth. And, in the middle of that scale was the marsh, a place she disliked quite a bit. It was hot, dark, the waters too thick to swim in properly, too dangerous for her to know what was going on. The feeling of being in a cage worsened when she first entered that place - so she decided to make it a habit to avoid it. Far too much was wrong with it.

So, when she woke up on her second day, she resolved to stay in town. There was a windmill (which she had only been told about and hadn't seen yet), a cemetery (which people seemed to think was a self explanatory concept), and supposedly more. Her day, truly, was filled with things to do, more things than to gaze out on the coast she washed ashore on and wonder if she would ever return to the sea.

Many more things to do.

Her focus strayed, however, when she encountered a puddle. It had rained sometime, leaving a small little pool, a tiny sea. It was adorable, she thought, moving to poke at it and watch the ripples, pretending she was the god of this sea, no matter how small it was, when she saw her reflection. All motions stopped, and if she were a human, her first reaction would be to reach her hand to her throat in horror.

Looking back at her was a strange furry thing - a cat, she knew, because that was what she had turned into, by the will of the sea. She had already gotten over the whole cat thing, somehow able to move surprisingly well in this form. But her throat.... she wondered if everyone could see it as harshly as she could.

Slightly off-center on her throat was a mass of white skin, scarred over, slightly indented as if there was flesh missing, her turquoise fur not able to grow on it at all. It was circular, jagged, and rather large - like someone had taken a serrated knife and cut her open like a pumpkin. Like a bite mark, perhaps, someone taking her throat, biting down, and then ripping. She had never seen the scar in her reflection before, in the sea. Perhaps fear of her mimicry wasn't the only thing that made her shunned from the siren community.

Nobody here had mentioned it to her. Nobody had given her any glances, any pitied looks, or gazes of horror. Was it new? Or had she just been lucky enough that everyone was as blissfully ignorant as she was? Was the spell the sea cast on her slowly becoming more potent? Would she finally turn back into her previous form, or was this just another sick reminder of her fate, as if the daily thrum of questions she couldn't answer wasn't torture enough?

Her previous plans forgotten, she opened her mouth, letting out a wheezing breath. There was no sound, no voice behind it, just an uncomfortable sound. Strangled, almost.

She closed her mouth and quietly fought the scream she couldn't let out.

tags - "speech"

When it came to scars, Wormwood wouldn't exactly say that he was an expert – that was too egotistical, along with the fact that he wasn't as old as some others in the group who no doubt had more scars, like Perseus – but he certainly also wouldn't say that he was unfamiliar with scars either. It was pretty clear from just looking at him that he had gone through a fair amount of injuries and scarring himself. From the most obvious being the large bandage that covered his now missing right eye, to the smaller scars that riddled his body from fights he had gotten into as a cub. In addition to this, there was also the large jagged scar on one of his back legs that was in the shape of a bite mark, perfectly sized for the shape of Vathmos's mouth, the one fragmented reminder of the incident that had happened when the hyena had gone into a blood rage. That wasn't even mentioning the crooked claw mark scars that streaked across his flank, another reminder of another fight, this time against the fox leader of the Pitt, Jervis. Unlike many of his other scars, he actually wore those scars with some amount of pride, since it signified him taking on the "fearsome" little leader of the Pitt and getting several nasty shots in before he got all sliced up. The marks had been nothing to write home about, but they had been deep enough to leave scarring, in addition to the fact that he had almost bled out on the way home because of them.

As a result of all these different scars, Wormwood hadn't even blinked twice when he had seen the long scar that had stretched sideways across Echo's throat, looking rather gruesome compared to the rest of her rather pretty appearance. He hadn't really paused upon it for too long, figuring it wasn't worthy of contemplation. He had figured that it had been some sort of battle scar from the sea, or that it was the reason that she wasnt able to speak in anything except for echoes of others' words. He supposed that didn't make sense, since if her vocal chords had been cut she wouldn't be able to talk at all, even in the word fragments of other people, but as had been previously mentioned, he hadn't exactly thought it through thoroughly. Either way, he didn't think of her throat scar as anything to be too horrified over, since it was just another marking of her story. Scars had never been something to be ashamed of to him, and perhaps Echo thought that was foolish, considering the way that the society of the sea seemed so much more harsh and overbearing and judgemental, but Worm didn't think it was foolish at all, so this was why he ended up looking with a great deal of confusion when he saw Echo sitting in front of a puddle, looking dejected. She looked like she was about ready to go running off and dive back once again beneath the sea, and he really conceivably couldn't figure out why, so before the chaser knew it, his legs were carrying him over to her. He watched her for a moment before he spoke in a soft rumble from the back of his throat, his head tilting as his one blue eye softened as he took in the distraught look on her face, "Echo? Are you alright? You look as though you've seen a ghost, or something like that... do you need to talk about it...? Er... do you want me to help you talk about it?" He didn't want it to seem as though he was patronizing her, he just knew that she wouldn't be able to respond without her library of words to echo from, and he didn't know how much she had at this point.