Lion Head Mesa and if you could still see the moon

For Braenar. (This is… unreasonably long, to catch up on backstory. I promise I won’t be keeping this up, nor do I expect you to match post-length!)

The journey may have been long, but it was far from arduous. Although their feet had taken them roughly 1000 kilometers - as the crow flies - they had made the most of it. For weeks now, Ira Astoria and his firstborn son, Braenar, had "endured" a resplendent pilgrimage from their home so far to the east. Travelling was not novel to Ira; that said, his pack, Ad Astra, was not in the habit of travelling unless it were ordained by the sky that they must, and it did take time to be able to accurately predict when that might occur. For instance, his children had only ever known the valley in which their pack had settled just a couple years back. And, in fact, there the rest of the pack still remained. But it was not meant to be for the two Astorias shaking out their coats from the recent rains that had blown through them, now once again in a land full of unexplored wonders.

Ira had chosen their path carefully, following the rising signs to the west and counting the days by measures of the moon. Even though he had not ascended to the council of star-gazing experts that made up the diviners they'd left behind (as he was expected to do), the talent for leadership nevertheless lived on within him and was expressed heartily throughout their travels. Every day was a new opportunity to teach his son how to position themselves by relating landmarks to the position of celestial objects overhead as the sunlight began to fade each evening. Together they were able to appreciate the most variegated landscapes he could ever have imagined - some beyond his capabilities to foresee. Rising mountains that would have been impossible to summit; stretches of high desert that you could not see the horizon across, but merely a shadow of gray where your eyesight could travel no further; every type of tree and forest that he could have imagined (albeit knowing that seeing so many new things surely meant there were unending discoveries in every direction); wide rivers and lakes of greens, blues, grays, and even clear - their bottoms littered with dead trees like eerie snakes below the surface; and of course, the weather.

The callouses on the pads of his feet were thick, and a far different color than they had been before setting out. They had baked underneath an unforgiving sun, been blown off course by fierce winds, endured rains ranging from constant drizzle to flash downpours, and just last week had seen the first snow of the season whilst crossing a low mountain pass. One thing remained the same, no matter where they went: the stars. They had not traveled outside of the same section of sky that made up the familiar constellations he was accustomed to (and indeed, did not think that the sky could possibly look different anywhere else). And so, despite the changing weather and terrain, he was unsurprised when they started to encounter trees turning orange, brown, and red. Autumn was setting in.

The thought had occurred to him more than once lately that despite having no indication from their horoscoping that their journey was nearing an end, they needed to consider bedding down in an area where hunting would be flush through the winter, and limit their range to more-or-less a “territory.” It had been easy enough for the two of them to take down the summer game (and oh, what a variety that was, too!), but that benefit was not likely to last. And so, despite there still being several good hours of travel left in him for the day, he stopped walking. It was not, of course, the first time they had stopped. They weren’t mad. They slept, they recuperated, they even took time for recreation. There were a few weeks that they had given to exploring only a small swath of land along as though they might stay, but always they ended up moving on. As Ira told Braenar frequently, when they were meant to stop, they would. And judging by how strong their muscles had become, they were built for a long journey yet to come.

He put his nose to the sky and sniffed. They had come upon something of a plateau, the slow rise of the land and suddenly become very flat. Though it was not the tallest terrain in the region, it did offer a fair look at some of the landmarks and vegetation around them. At once, his body stiffened, for two different reasons. The first was that he smelled other predators having recently been near, and more importantly wolves. Of course, this was not the first time they’d encountered other wolves, but it still called for caution. The second, and far more important, was what he saw on the horizon. Water. The biggest, incalculable expanse of water he had ever seen. It was by no means close to them, but it could not be ignored. "What… is that," he said, more to himself than anything, eyes wide and unblinking. He surely did not expect his son to know. But neither did he.