Haunted Wood come away to the water

It was hard to fathom just how long he had been down there – trapped in the tunnels. The others seemed to have accepted their fate and grown used to the dark holes that had been made into homes. Brom could never. All the while that he existed beneath the earth, he dreamed of the heavens above. Purgatory had not been everything that had been promised to him, but then he knew that he should not have imagined it as anything more than what it had been. For all of the time that he had spent there, he imagined that he would have felt older than he did. Years had passed, after all. He was no longer the spry-limbed beast of his youth. Still, he had won his freedom by shedding the last of his flaws…
 
Or, that was what he believed to be true.
 
The hallow creature moved through the wood slowly. Brom’s gait could have been mistaken for a hunter’s prowl were it not for the noise that he willingly made. After having spent so much time with the others who had been condemned with him, the swarthy wolf had not imagined that he would have faced the light of day again. There was a loneliness to the world above. The tunnels, while frightening in their own sense, had been comfortable and lived in. Brom was uncertain of his freedom. The further that he prowled through the woods, the more he had started to believe that it all could have been a dream. The thought of waking up to the scent of earth and moist air was enough to halt him in his tracks.
 
Brom turned his head to the north and breathed in the scent of rain. It had been so long since he had tasted the air fresh with raindrops. Surely, that could not have been a dream.