It had been another sleepless night. All of Njal's energy went in to protecting Maera during the day, from the moment she woke up to well after she fell asleep beside him. He watched her slumber with the diligence he should have given to the other children; all of that energy, all of that fear he held in losing the last of his kin, was directed upon the young girl. It seemed as if the days were growing too short, too fast - the glacier spent most of its days cloaked in the darkness of an oncoming winter, and that was something Njal was steadily beginning to loathe.
He wanted to run away. He wanted to return to the creek, or head somewhere less dangerous to them all - but most important to him, although he would never admit it aloud, Njal wanted to leave. To return to the road and not look back. The responsibility placed upon him to be a single parent was far too much at this point. He wasn't equipped. Perhaps the guilt he felt (conscious or not) was what fueled his desperate need to keep an eye on his remaining child.
The sky was streaked in gold, like a summer field. Like Kindred in the peak of the hotter seasons. Njal could see the light from the den where the pair of Sveijarns roosted - and he was suddenly pulled away from Maera's side by the sight of it. Yearning for simpler days. He would be within earshot - within running distance, surely - if anything were to threaten her. Or so he told himself.
But already the man was going farther. His strides devoured the land as he dove between the trees, carving paths with his wide body, and lending a thunderous applause to an otherwise still landscape. A dead landscape. When he stopped, he was out of breath - and faced with the eastern edge of the territory, far outside of his mental boundary of permitted distance from Maera; he was breathing hard, and yet the energy of his spontaneous run did not echo through his dead-eye stare.