No need to pray, no need to speak

Crows freed their croaky voices as they rose from the tree line. From below they appeared to barely skim the mountaintops as they flapped and cawed, but Larch knew they would be high above the snow-laden peaks. Her sharp gaze followed them over the Sunspire to where their shadowy forms melded with the fog and clouds before continuing on her way towards the borders of Northstar Vale. Her gait had regained its usual vigour and her coat was well on its way to the lustrous mass of honey it had been before – before she had left the Vale to wander. Larch was safe now, with the walls of mountains surrounding her, and her relief showed in every elegant feature. That relief was to be short-lived.

The natural skyscrapers sighed occasionally, always eliciting an ear twitch or flick from the wolfess far below. Larch was on alert, as Xi'nuata had warned her to be – but nothing could prepare her for what was coming to meet her at the range's base. At first she thought it was simply a concentration of fog, the white puff which rose from the rocky ridges, but a scraping, moaning sound made Larch stop in her tracks, eyes narrowed to slits.

The golden-brown woman had never experienced an avalanche, though she knew what they were. And suddenly it was far, far too late to call on any past knowledge she may have had about how to survive one. Reams of snow, like a cloud thrown down from the heavens, loomed, and Larch turned to run – to sprint for her life.

Her legs were long and they reached as far as they could with every step, but Larch was still impeded by the landscape's natural rises and dips. All those landmarks which she believed would one day help her to navigate the Vale were now obstacles in the way of her pursuit of safety. The bronze wolf leapt a fallen log, her jump falling short of her intended target and leaving her with a twinge in her left hind leg where her ankle struck the rotting wood. Cursing under her breath, Larch pushed onward, down the congregation of hills. The moaning had grown to a rumbling as the snow tumbled from above at a dizzying speed – dizzying enough for Larch to forget where she was or where she was headed.

At the last second – in a moment of madness – Larch turned and growled at the rolling whiteness, angling her body and bracing for impact. She hadn't taken into account the overhang under which she was standing, nor the snow's ferocity. It had always seemed so passive – until it clamoured over the natural rocky shelf and she was knocked back.

Cold gripped Larch; it pressed insistently at her long-legged body, twisting and numbing her mind and reducing her to something still more useless than the dulled creature who had returned to Northstar Vale. Everything was misty blue shadow; that was all she could take in before the insistent pounding in her head robbed her of thought. Whimpering, trying to rise, Larch found that her legs betrayed her. She tried to call out, but her voice was failing her, too, and all that was managed was a curdled yell, choked and muffled by the snow which lay across the small space.

The pure, glittering snow had become a cage, and Larch had been reduced to a shivering wreck of a wolf. Her head was heavy, her vision blurred as she stumbled against the snowy walls she was bound in, barely feeling the sting of ice cutting into her cheek. Judging by the burgundy smears on the rocks and ice, that wasn't the only place she bled, but that was all the assessment of her predicament Larch could make before she succumbed to the cold, to her head injury – to whatever it was which brought on darkness.

some intense things are supposed to happen in the landslide thread, so if anybody else is planning on posting here, PM me first so i can summarize what happens so you at least know how to have your characters respond :'D

Finding Dawa had been his main priority. After the monk revealed that he had left her behind, Raheerah's mind instantly flipped to search and rescue mode. Though he would guiltily admit that he didn't care to find anybody other than his Lham, he wouldn't leave behind anybody he found that wasn't her. He had already established his intentions of searching for them and fled the safety zone without looking to see who followed. Anger seethed through him and fueled the male, who surged forward across the new banks of snow and dirt that cascaded into the valley. The mountains appeared broken down, lazily sloping into the Vale where once his packmates roamed freely. Now, he knew naught if they remained under the blanket of snow, trapped by the weakness of the mountains. He was approaching them, where still groans emanated from the shifting weight of the snow and dirt, the remnants of the landslide settling in.

It had barely been an hour since the snow had fallen. He held apprehension still that more would come from the mountains, so he moved quickly; he did not know how long anybody could survive under the fallen debris. With his nose to the snow, he struggled to catch any scent of his lost packmates, searching with particular attention towards Lham's aromas. But he caught nothing, no Lham, no packmate, nothing that smelled vaguely of wolf. What would indicate to him the presence of a trapped body beneath was not smell, nor the sound of struggling, but the slight irregularity in the surface of the snow. As if it had been forced to roll over something only a few feet beneath it.

His mind instantly leaped to Lham. It was about the proper size. He could easily imagine her small body to be the right shape to create this small disturbance, a tiny hill in the otherwise flat surface of the snow. The beast lunged for the lump and began to dig furiously at it, sending a spray of white behind him. Heavy growls accompanied the male's actions, biting furiously at the snow as he tried to quicken the pace at which he dug into the hill. And, as if by some miracle, he eventually brushed against a hidden body, dull nails scraping against near frozen skin. Raheerah's heart exploded in his chest - could it be Lham? He tried to unbury more and more of the creature, unable to identify them, until he found her scent wafting up.

It was not Lham. Raheerah paused for a moment and snarled, agitated. She was still out there. But he had found somebody, and they might know where his Lham was - so he continued to dig her out, frantic to save the body that had been buried beneath the debris.

Larch has a slash across her cheek, a head wound and an injured back leg. Whee, injuries :D Hope it's okay if I reply now!

Larch lay trembling in her encasement of snow and rock, barely aware that she was still breathing – and then only aware because she could still feel biting, stinging cold in every limb. Her fur was sodden and dirtied, her cheek slit open by a falling shard of rock or ice – it hardly mattered which. All in all, the once proud fighter looked as if she had given up the fight. Who would find her here when she knew only a couple of faces within the Vale and they might not even know she had returned?

Something in the darkness made the half-frozen female's head ache and a sickening feeling stirred in her stomach. Her prison was moving, chunks of it flying away to let in a light which felt so bright and painful that Larch felt as if she had never seen true light before. This brightness was so pure and she was so lacking in warmth that she felt as if she were looking straight into a strike of lightning.

A weight at her side fell – or flew – away, and Larch whimpered, turning her head as far as she was able to in an effort to shut out the light. Her body begged to be left where it was, soaking and crumpled, but she hadn't come back to Northstar Vale to simply give up. It was a mammoth of a task to move at all, and when the honey-pelted woman finally did try to crawl through the opening made by her leader she found she was stopped; impeded by a weight on her left hindleg.

Larch let out a gasp of pain as the mild air hit her face, her front paws scrabbling blindly at the snow. It was no good: the she-wolf, with all the determination she possessed, was pinned down by a blunt, heavy rock. Her eyes flickered open, bright with fear, and she cast a pleading look towards the frantic-looking form of her leader, Raheerah, who had put rules in place to keep them out of trouble. Larch had always had a knack for getting into trouble, rules or not. This time, though, trouble had found her – and then Raheerah had. How many times was she to be lost and found again? A whimper passed her lips as she considered letting her head flop back down to the peace of numbness, but the Warrior's breath was on her, furious in its exertions, and she had promised she would be useful. A bag of bones was no use to anyone.

aww poor babby! i'm assuming the rock is buried under the snow too, ye? PM me and lemme know if i need to change anything!

A moment after he had revealed the trapped woman, she tried to move, and Raheerah took a step back to allow her space. She was probably hungry for fresh air after having been trapped beneath the snow, though he didn't know for how long she had been victim to the weight of the debris. She easily could have been trapped after the first slide. It wasn't until her eyes peeled open and he was met with a fearful stare that he realized something was wrong. She was unable to free herself from the icy prison the avalanche had created. For whatever reason, something was keeping her anchored in the snow, which meant he had to dig her out further.

With a grunt, he began to dig into the snow that surrounded her, using his paws to shovel away chunks of white from her body. He moved around her, until his claws scraped against the solid, cold texture of a boulder. There was a slight snarl as pain radiated through his paws, his nails met with an unexpected obstacle, but the snarl persisted as he realized that this boulder was not only an obstacle of his digging, but most likely the thing that kept his packmate tied down in the snow. And he wasn't entirely sure if he could move it himself, let alone dig enough of it out. So, another idea evolved in his head, born of frantic urgency to free this woman so he could continue his search for Lham.

He returned to her side where he had already dislodged some of the snow. The dragon huffed, burrowing into the snow and sending a spray of white behind him as he tried to excavate the woman, and moved towards her pinned hind leg. After a few minutes of steadfast shoveling, he reached the area where her leg was trapped beneath the boulder. Raheerah, for a fleeting moment, wondered if he should exercise some caution in working around her leg. But the idea quickly left him in favor of freeing Larch in the shortest period of time possible. Heedless for her injury, he dug around her leg, shoveling out snow from beneath so that he could open up enough space below the rock for her to wiggle free.