Gyrfalcon's Keep My heart is a warrior

Set sometime on 07/04/14

With her goal in sight and her heart steeled against the wolves she would abandon, Jinx had spent the last three days travelling every inch of Silvertip Mountain she could reach, celebrating her birthday in busy isolation. Although she was capable and fit, she was nevertheless a woman of forests and coastlines, unfamiliar with the mountain terrain. Her paw pads were torn from countless stumbles onto sharp rocks protruding from the lichen-padded ground, and every muscle in her ached. She wouldn't have been surprised to find bruises on the lengths of her very bones. Yet there was an exhausted satisfaction in the Kesuk when she awoke on the fourth day, with her eyes set on Gyrfalcon Keep to the mount's north.

Jinx had only perused the mountain under the light of the sun, and found some peculiar sights. To the south and east, the mountain was hospitable enough, offering challenge to any who crossed it yet rewarding those who persisted in their climb with fantastic views. To the west, the mountain was a sprawling expanse of sheer cliffs and dead-end plateaus, an excellent location from which to scout the sprawling coastline. One day, it would become a training ground for those wolves seeking to harden themselves and find their courage.

Mid-afternoon found the black-footed Beta on a smaller mountain adjacent to Silvertip, from which she could survey the northern face of her inevitable domain. The gyrfalcons for which this mild-mannered mountain was named were nowhere to be seen. Jinx was thankful for that, for it allowed her to get close to Silvertip, close enough to be seated on a ridge looking up at the mountain... Close enough to see the strangest feature of the northern face clearly. Had she been more intelligent and experienced, she would have recognized the peculiar waves of hexagonal, columnar basalt spilling down the mountainside as proof of slow volcanic activity from thousands of years previous, but all she saw were perfectly shaped columns of airy stone that baffled her very comprehension of mountain terrain.