Blackfeather Woods Seems I deal with things a bit differently.

Mou is avoiding the inevitable and he's using the cave, and its occupant, as a distraction from the storm that is brewing between himself and Maegi. He knows he can't resist the caves either, and so he makes a choice. He'll avoid Maegi for now and focus on the girl with the red coat; it was his mistake that brought the girl to the woods and he knows he can't make up for it yet, that she's ill and its his fault and everyone is in danger, but he's set in a mild panic about it and knows he's stuck. He may as well make the best of a bad situation, right? So he avoids Maegi and he faces the dark of the cavern despite the chill it leaves in his skin, the nagging of a vocie he doesn't recognize telling him to stay back and to keep out — maybe he's picking up on the girl's own fears because she most certainly is afraid right now, or maybe this is something more. Mou doesn't think he's ever investigated Wolfskull Cave before and yet, as he trails through the corridors, they leave an eerily familiar sick feeling in the back of his throat. A bitterness he can't explain.

So, he doesn't. He ignores it as best he can, traces a route using the nearest wall — the same way he travelled those tunnels for so many days, avoiding the ever-present jaws of death, and that ominous voice telling him to just die.

When he finds her this time, she's an ember dying on the hearth. She's flickering against the shadows, and Mou has to squeeze his eyes shut for a second to gather himself. He advances slowly and quietly towards her, not wanting to cause her fright or upset beyond what he's obviously created for her already; but he trips up on a discarded animal skull. The hare — what bits of skull she hasn't eaten has been tossed aside, and now tumbles in the dirt with a tail of vertebrae. The rattling of the bones startles him too and he flicks his wrist, drawing the skull towards him in the next instance (almost like he's dribbling a soccer ball), passes it to a hind foot, and kicks it away.

In the descending quiet he feels tension, and it only gets worse while he looks her over; how badly he wishes he could speak to her, to apologize properly, but Mou is here for answers of his own. His mind is buzzing with questions that he cannot fathom asking, so instead he clears his throat and mumbles, Hou felling? That isn't clear enough and he tries again, H-how, uh, how feel? His voice sounds so loud in this void-space and he's startled back to silence.