Silvertip Mountain holy holy

Very rarely did Olive know why she did the things she did — the tiny woman had always paid far too much unquestioning attention to her whims and whimsies — but without the tethers of a pack, without the safety belt that was the great knight Dakarai, she fed these impulses guiltlessly and while it may sound and appear and feel to be free and unfettered, it was more truthfully a prison to her.

— for it was some unknown corner of her heart that had led her back to that hell-place, the forest of trees weeping crimson and wailing woeful songs; where perhaps there were once happy memories, but there were no longer.  The fae had not wished to glimpse the stained arbors, standing strong and stout to face the shrill winter brine, but she was as powerless to stop her wanderer’s feet as she was to stall the hand of fate. 

Too soon, Ravensblood Forest was before her. It was a looming, heavy mass that began to gnaw at her conscious without delay. Olive stood in wait despite the gripping within, as lofty and light and mindless as if she were just another winter snowflake — internally, she had shifted from thinking and doing to simply feeling and she knew why she had come the moment she recognized that sweet, familiar, sorrowful hitch in her heart. 

There it was. 

She could still feel. Even if she only ever felt bad, it reminded her that she was alive. Feeling bad was better than feeling nothing at all, she supposed. It was one of the things she did not question.

It was not long for the scent of others to reach her nares, and when it did, Olive was quick to reel against this too; against the realization that the whole earth kept on spinning, and life kept playing its funny little games, the kaleidoscope of humanity kept turning itself on its head and rains drained from the mountaintops only to become rainfall one more and all of life’s cycles continued, all the rhythms of the planet churning as evenly as ever and how everything — everyone — had moved on without her. Without a moment to spare, the shrouded sylph seized and skittered from the fringes of ravensblood’s society and did not stop moving until she finally felt cleansed, run clean, of the place. With the suddenly elevation her lungs felt expansive and Olive breathed deep, gulping, heaving breaths not because she was spent from her exertions but from the sweetness of the alpine air. Silvertip, she knew this place well. The tempest finally stilled her body, but her attention was alive, beseeching and easily captured by a glinting, opalescent pool where the mountain’s meltwater had coalesced but not yet frozen over. Olive drifted closer and made to kiss the water and slake her thirst — and she would have, if not for the eau-de-nil gaze she found on her descent. 

At first, she did not even recognize the reflection as herself.

And then, for a moment, she stared and wondered what and who this wolf in the water was. What was her story? This small woman of ash and bone, she could be anything — anything she’d ever wanted to be — in that moment, and for all the moments yet to come. Olive knew almost nothing about this shewolf, and considered her the luckiest to live entirely unencumbered by the faults of the past. 

With a sudden flash of jealousy, Olive dashed her reflection with a strike of a featherlight paw —and the lucky wolfess was obfuscated. Perhaps others could forget the past, but she was unfortunately herself and that part to of herself seemed to be broken. Her children had forgotten. The coast had forgotten. The world had forgotten… but why couldn’t she?