Deepwood Weald autré temps

For @Dirge, but anyone's welcome!

Days and weeks had come and gone, and the only thing that had really changed was the landscape.  Even that had only changed so much, though, as she now found herself back in the very wilderness she'd visited briefly before.  Memory flashed back to the kindly wolf she'd met at the mountains last time she'd been here.  She could remember neither his name nor the specific peak he reigned, and it was the search for him that had led her here — to this ancient, old-growth forest of stately majesty and shadowed intrigue.  The scent of other wolves was heavy in the area, and she wondered if she'd inadvertently strayed onto claimed lands.  Threading her way through the massive trunks whose dew-kissed limbs stroked the length of her body like so many caressing hands, the pale she-wolf sought to leave the wooded expanse as soon as she figured out precisely where the edges of its boundary lay.