Blacktail Deer Plateau I See Clearly Now

Malachi squinted against the western horizon, where the flatland broke to titanous peaks. In recent dawns he had woken to a veil of fog draped over the distant land, so thick the mountains could have marched away in the night. Of course he had known their presence behind the shroud, and the afternoon sun always broke their veil. But maybe those mornings were what the plains were like, only without the expectation of anything on the horizon to appear from the abyss. Only endless grass and sky, and that was where his imagination frustrated to awe.

"That must've been quite something," he murmured, half to himself, before he averted his attention back to Pearl. Her return did not catch him off-guard, and he offered his response as veiled as the mountains behind the morning fog. "Not much. I lived in a valley surrounded by mountains. This is about the flattest land I've lived on." He'd lived here long enough to accept the landscape as home in the broadest sense, but even still he felt oddly exposed without the mountains on every side. "But you, coming from the plains. What made you choose to settle in a place so different?"