King Elk Forest I met him in a crowded room

For the first day and a half following her fall, Saena drifted in and out of consciousness. Each time her eyes fluttered briefly open, the sight of dozens of animals milling about, all of them a strange and unreal white, would send her back into the dark place of her mind. There, she found nothing. Her memory could summon up only two details: Saena and Leader. Somewhere in the midst of her unconsciousness she was able to bring to mind the look of the place she needed to find, but aside from that, her mind was blank. When she awoke for the final time in the King Elk Forest, the first thing she did was vomit from the pain in her head and body, and the second thing she did was panic at the sheer unfamiliarity of her surroundings. It was like the first day of her life, and though she knew that that was a tree and those were leaves and the babbling sound of water was surely a brook, she was naught but a newborn in her knowledge of where in the world she was.

She went through three more panic attacks before managing to gather her wits about her. Saena, she mentally told herself. That's who you are. That was dismally little to know about oneself, though. Leader. That is what you are. Saena, the leader of god knows what. She blinked owlishly through a haze of frightened tears, bringing the forest back into focus in an effort to orient herself, though that was impossible. With clarity renewed, the wolf glanced about her. Over there to the left there was a white lynx watching her, like nothing she'd ever seen. Cat, she knew, though she didn't know how she knew, and she couldn't summon up any other details about it. As far as the amnesiac knew, however, this was perfectly normal. Animals looked like that, and so did she, she reasoned.

To the right, a fat white owl stared down at her from the trees. To any onlooker, neither of these animals existed—all of them were figments of Saena's imagination, hallucinations of the same sort she'd always been able to see in times of stress—only now they were everywhere. A white raven lit from the ground twenty feet away. A white mouse skittered across the littered husks of brown locusts. A white hare hopped out of the undergrowth... and overtaken by feral hunger, Saena surged forward, ignoring the painful protests of her body, and launched herself at it. Her paws met their mark upon its body, but then flew through it like it was made of nothing but mist, and she tumbled and snarled with a great deal of noise into a bare bush as it disappeared.