Kintla Flatlands in the heart of the beast they will lay

For @Valerius, set in some nondescript area of Kintla Flatlands. Seemed like a good middle ground for them to encounter one another!

He lost the herd somewhere in the mid-morning fog that had yet to burn off. A mere annoyance, Mordecai had been hoping to gauge where it was that they had been heading in their westerly direction. What he was really doing out there, away from the borders was another story entirely. It had been a good day for a pre-dawn run, a chance to exert energies that were otherwise pent up. A quiet calm had come to the Spine, and the leery worry as to whether or not it was good or bad had troubled him deeply. In a way, Sitri's words had been somewhat true, that bad things came at the end of calm periods; Mordecai's previous hope that it wasn't so was nothing more than a sliver now.

So getting out and away was perhaps the best practice he could have prescribed himself. He chose not to trouble the recruits beneath him, nor bring his concerns to Cara or Kaname, neither of which he had seen in days past. Her ventures at the borders seemed fewer and fewer, but the markings were strong as ever. She lingered in the territory and he, well, he found he still avoided her in light of all things. Her help, for the most part, was not something he found he wanted. He anticipated her eventual resistance. Huffing to himself, the herd was nowhere to be found beneath the edges of a stout copse canopy. They had eluded him, and he kicked at the ground irritably.

murder by death — that crown don't make you a prince