Phoenix Maplewood Are you still around?

The sound of her sister came through the trees, accompanied by a deeper note she did not recognize. But the voices were muffled, and Nanook couldn't make out their words. It occurred to her this was her last chance to turn around, and her chest tightened in a sickening knot. Her step staggered with the sudden panic, but she resumed a steady onward trot. Where her stubbornness once made her push Desna away, it now kept her from running again. Confronting her sister rocked her with inexplicable fear, but she had made up her mind, and no one could change that - not even her.

The only words Nanook caught before she burst into the clearing were lost on her the moment she lay eyes on Desna. The girl's paws froze to the ground and her legs grew rigid, a resistance from the ice still gripping her heart. But fractures chipped away at the frozen cage, crevices Nanook hadn't been able to mend, and when she saw her sister now - though she knew nothing of what had happened in the days she had been gone - a surge of desperation flooded her face and mind. Her tunnel-focus made the man in her peripheral inconsequential; it was Desna she was after, but the anxious fear of actually standing here turned her words to a gawking silence.