Mount Apikuni The Scar on the Mountain

@Kodokuna I’m keeping this vague because our thread with Ferdie isn’t done yet. Set some time after that thread, but before Red joins SS, maybe? I can always go back and change it later. Also, I was playing a lot off of the description of Mount Apikuni for this post. You may want to read it before responding so you know what I’m talking about.

It was raining lightly that mid-afternoon when Red decided she needed to go exploring again. Her Coyote blood made her restless, and the urge to move was a constant. She still had no memory of her life before the Teekon Wilds, but that didn’t matter so much to her anymore. All she knew now was that, so far, she was enjoying her life here more than she had previously thought possible. Slowly, she was becoming braver and more likely to step up to a wolf, rather than running from them. This was a good thing. She was building up her courage to join a pack, and she already had a feeling she knew which pack to choose. Kodokuna had been kind to her, as well as the alpha male. They had fed her, and she felt tied to them somehow. Maybe she was just being dramatic, but she didn’t care. She knew she needed to find a pack to live in one way or the other. Why not choose the pack with wolves you already knew, and who had been nice to you? That seemed like a smarter option than traipsing all over the place waiting to stumble on more packs that might not be so friendly.

She was thinking about all of this as she made her way to her destination. She had seen Mount Apikuni from a distance and decided that morning that she needed to conquer it. She would be the greatest explorer ever, which would later come in handy when she pursued the Outrider Trade. The muscle she was gaining in her legs was traveling to her shoulders as well, so that now she was still small, but also lithe and strong - like a jungle cat, only not.

As she approached the mountain, she noticed that only one-half of it seemed to be thriving. The other half, the northern face, was a dark canvas of sheer rock that looked broken. And small, hardly noticeable pokes of green were coming up from the soil. Something odd had happened on this side that hadn’t happened to the rest of the mountain. It had been years since the landslide and fire, so the clues leftover were few and far between. There was no ash to cue Red to the forest fire, and the rocks and boulders from the landslide had long ago been swallowed by the earth where they’d settled at the bottom of the mountain. Now it looked as though Apikuni had always been this weirdly deformed formation sprouting from the ground.

But the coywolf who stood at its base knew something had happened, and with a determined air began the trek up to the darkest part of the northern face, where the tiny saplings of trees were beginning to grow back after months of nothing but ash.