I don't trust mountains [Mini-plot]

The morning light brought a sneer to her face. It was blinding and sharp. Lancing through her vision as if to pry her lids apart and thrust in to her retina; and Bayou hissed, low and long, as she woke to it. She sounded like a cat in heat. Rolling and lounging from her side to her back, and flashing her exposed belly to the light. A teenager unwilling to leave her bed to go to work.

Bayou had no reason to stick around here. She knew that with spring approaching things would be easier; she had scouted out plenty of packs in the area and that meant there was sufficient food. Her foray to the nearby river had left her feeling bitter and loathsome towards herself. Internalized distress emerged as an external urge to seek out that which she prized most dearly: her precious poppies. Something to ease her mind, to take her from this place.

It was thoughts of drifting and drowsing that, ironically perhaps, roused the spidery youth. Forced her to seek out areas where poppies had the potential to grow; away from the mountain, through the trees, where the light she hated could touch the ground. But her instincts were off. There was something about today that was wrong and it would not dawn upon her until much later - when the sun had taken full control. Beaming waves of heat and light down upon her back, as if to burn her.

Bayou resisted the sun by seeking out the trees once again. Giving up on her desires for the time being, she sought only the shade and the cold that the forest afforded her. She bayed an unhappy sound towards the sky as if to mock the light, the heat, the day. For a creature of such strangeness Bayou was in actuality quite level headed; she knew the sun could not hear her. That her actions held no consequence - and so it was that the rumbling of the earth, which rose in hungry waves, surprised her. The girl lurched to her feet and staggered, her entire self alert to the sounds of rumbling in the distance. It was distant, for a time. Bayou leapt away from the sounds but found her lanky strides taking her closer, closer, too close.

The mountain crumbled and left ruination in its wake. Dust and debris scattered down the mountainside, striking down healthy trees and forming a wave of disaster.

Bayou did what came naturally - she ran. Her body was spurred on by adrenaline and the sounds of apocalypse which rang out around her, and she wove between the trees, no longer afraid of being seen or being flashed by the sun. It was the sun that led her to freedom, for out of the cloud of dust she could make out its glimmer.

By the time the child stopped running the rumbling had stopped. She could hear it still, feel it in the core of her bones, and was thoroughly spooked. Exhaustion and muscle tension plagued her, but the girl could not stop. She had to keep going, going, going. Hard running and hungry gulps of air. When the strange girl did stop she collapsed, her breath raspy from all the inhaled particulate and the vigorous, unending effort to avoid being crushed by the rocks. The sunlight cut a swath of color across the horizon, a line of foreboding red that caught Bayou's attention and only soured her mood further.

Whatever cataclysm had occurred was fresh upon her mind, but she was not going to return to the territory until she knew without a doubt that it was safe.