Bearclaw Valley b

In-text tags are for reference purposes only. @Arlette

Many had gone and his co-leader was no more. Blackfeather was no longer what it once was, it hadn’t been in a long time, and he understood that—he’d need to be blind to not see what had been happening for years now. No matter, he lingered just as he always had, standing guard over the woods as the ghost that could not be freed—

—but, he was free. No one kept him there, there was not a chain binding him to the forest. It was by choice that he remained and, several mornings ago, it was his decision that allowed him to venture out into the world for the first time in what felt like ages. He did not go suddenly, however, as he made certain to alert @Astara to his leaving; he would be back, he explained to her, but he needed some time to readjust to, essentially, a new world. Then, shortly after, he pulled himself from the grasp of the shadows and headed north.

For two days and three nights he travelled, navigating paths that, once upon a time, he’d braved a million times before. It was on the third morning that he arrived at the valley, surprised to find that the scent of a pack was not there; he found traces here and there, of his son and of others he did not know, but nothing was recent. Had they been there, perhaps, but he knew not how long it’d been.

The vast emptiness made things easier, somehow.

Kove made his way down the valley’s entrance way, the memories woven into his muscles guiding him far better than they had anywhere else; Bearclaw was his home away from home, the place that had both built and destroyed him. It was where his wife had thought best for them to settle, where his children had been born... but it was also where everything had fallen apart.

It was where he had let down his family for the first time, where he should have abandoned his name at, for the fall of his marriage and their kingdom was, truly, the demise of his entire being—the entire ground on which the morals of his family’s name was built.

He was hardly an Apaata since then, and he knew it.

The valley knew it.

The spirits knew it.

And so he meandered through the valley, blinded by the images of the past, being led by memories alone.