Alpine Lake Treated me like a stranger

Quiet paw steps could be heard as the copper maiden made her way down to the pebble-dashed shore of the lake, her eyes wide with curiosity. Dipping her cranium, she quenched her thirst as she watched the stars begin to dance on the surface of the crystalline liquid. The trees may have been stripped bare, their skeletal leaves left to hang like dead carcasses, yet the night sky never changed. This, amongst many others, was one of the reasons why the canid was so captivated by the mysterious beauty of the flecks of light, yet she knew her curiosity could never truly be solved; she would always be left with unanswerable questions.

Raising her muzzle, she shook the remaining droplets off her whiskers, and continued trotting through the light surf, relishing the cooling effect that it had on her cracked pads. She was more used to soft grassland, moorland perhapse, certainly not the rocky landscape of mountains or, heavens forbid, the shadowing confines of a forest. It wasn't as if she was afraid of those places, the maiden just preferred open ground where the sky above her never threatened to disappear.

She came to a halt a few feet away from a darkened cavern, it's depths shrouded in shadow. Every part of her screamed not to venture inside, to avoide being swallowed by the mountain nothing at all costs, yet movement from inside the hollow sparked an adventurous twist in the canids mind. Not to mention the scent; strange and foreign, yet somewhat enticing, food perhapse? With ears pinned back to her skull, the copper maiden padded stiffly inside, her pelt bristling with uncertainty as she neared the figure. To her surprise, it held the telltale features of a lupin causing her to jerk backwards. She jerked backwards, crouching low, her gaze still curious but unsure of what to make of the other as she waited for its reaction.