Hideaway Strath the one minute, the soldier's minute

in the overload of memories straining against the labyrinth walls of wintersbane's mind and what felt like a internal war not to lose what shreds of sanity he felt he was clinging to and the enormous effort to focus on their conversation in lieu of the throbbing in his head ( and possibly not throwing up on towhee or in her vicinity ) he does not immediately notice the hawk perched on her shoulder ...and when he does he pays it little mind. it's not the strangest thing he's encountered in his life, after all.

asterism grove. wintersbane naturally assumes this is the name of her pack. nothing like the gaelic his father spoke, nor the lilting words of the north of the nightingale queen. i'm a warrior and bef—, he pauses and takes an uneasy breath because speaking for long periods of time is still hard despite that the flesh wounds have healed to scars. before well this i was aiming for ambassador. he gestures with a paw to the scars on his neck, throat and face. it's hard for me to speak for long periods of time. he would not be reciting Shakespearean sonnets anytime soon ( thankfully ).

and then he asks, purely to sate his own curiosity in case he'd be turned away: there's a grave in the heart of the territory, marked by the hemlocks that grow and guard it. has anyone found it? has anyone disturbed it? if nothing else, that lotte's corpse continued to rest in everlasting peace was all he could muster to care about at the moment, his own welfare be damned.