Gyrfalcon's Keep ears ring and teeth click

His body was mending. It was a slow process, but it would happen, as it always did. The various injuries he had sustained as a child had left him with hardly a mark, and had Tetsubo been the type to spread stories of his greatness, he would have had many by now. His head no longer bothered him; his one devious eye with the extended pupil had returned to normal, so he no longer had the capacity to look beyond the veil, or so some might think. The light no longer plagued his vision and everything was sharp, crisp, and brutal, as they were meant to be. The rest of Tetsubo would piece itself together in the coming weeks.

The boy revisited the witch doctor of the sands, the flighty creature that had tended to him before, and after acquiring further treatment he chose to depart from the bay. During his previous excursions across the meadow and through the vareigated forests, he had spied many mountains - and now he sought one in particular. It was the closest to the bay, rising through the mist and vanishing before him like a great wall. It would be the perfect stage upon which to test his body — even if it was not ready, he would find his limits and push at them, strengthen himself, and come back from his injuries with an even greater prowess than before.

Or that was the plan. In theory it could work, but in practice, as he was learning now through the laborious breathing and excessive force needed to propel his heavy body up the mountainside, this was all much harder than it looked. Tetsubo knew he was strong. Before the incident leading him to Skellige, he had been well conditioned and excessively, obsessively, trained for such feats upon the mountain slopes. Yet he struggled, and the struggling was off-putting. The boy was so beleaguered by the mountain that he passed right by the other wolf, and only stopped to catch his breath, which happened almost directly in front of Lilith. He should have seen her - sensed her - but every inch of his body was screaming in protest by this point, so he merely sank to his haunches and panted hard with his eyes upon the dirt.