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.