& i reach for the birthplace for the stories of your hurt

@Hydra && anyone else at all,, ah a,,

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there is no place within her head for thoughts of home and hearth; she had not intended for her hunt to go this way.

and so, the silver had come to an impasse.

the young hind that she had pursued since last eve had been hers, but was no more — not when it had only just hopped over a heavily marked border and had since made its unsteady, blood-trailing, half-jogging way. but for all that she has been volatile, she is ever a rights-abiding tundrian first, and a she-wolf of breeding second. to dare past this perimeter would only beckon for danger. she was sure they would catch such a riddled find easily; the hind would not make it far beyond the spire in those foothill drifts. not with the ankle that she had twisted so terribly and the ribs that bruised so easily.

still: a low noise of discontent at this damned misfortune hitches up from somewhere between her lungs and her throat.

the silence that followed has been deafening; weighed and heavied against her eardrums. the rhythm is, at first, strange and unkind — until she knows it to be the wardrum beat of her base and bloody heart. the shiver of breath in lungs.

it is a lonely sound.

while she makes still the shivering of her lungs, kuunhekku looks upon those clawing peaks, the long, ireful shadows, the garish and idolsome roots, and does not recoil. rather, she wonders if, by any chance, like her, the ones who convived here had been weaned on seeds and harvests and deaths as she had been. perhaps ...if the staggering scent of their numbers by border alone was anything to go by.

but then, perhaps not.

the sotaherra turns, making to remove herself from here without complaint or call, and away from the choice that a lesser loner would surely have made.

the staff team luvs u

From afar, Hydra watches. There is something strangely familiar to the shape out in the distance that brings some semblance of discontent. Automatic was her decision, though it would not have mattered were recognition not to dawn. Should one misstep be made, Hydra would become the equivalent of Divine Intervention—she would be any trespassers undoing. In the shadows the matriarch lingered, out of sight upon her perch. The other blended well with the wintry white snow that had recently fallen, but Hydra's gaze did not leave her all the same once she had spotted the stranger.

The muscles in her hinds flexed, as though in anticipation. One of the mountains many wardens, the matriarch would protect Empyrean tooth and claw should one wrong move be made. But the other, in their contemplation, neither calls for company nor invades. Hydra is pleasantly surprised to see them go, and does not intervene to ask them to stay. The matriarch never truly made for good company. Hydra knew not far, now, was the hind that the other had chased here unwittingly; another of her pack would surely find it. Hydra, for now, merely watched the other depart—unseen and unheard in the upper reach she still patrolled from, silent as she merely made sure the others mind would not change along the way. All the while, Hydra sought to piece together how she might know this face. The matriarch sniffed at the wind, but this pale stranger was downwind; it did not reach where she herself patrolled from.

the staff team luvs u