Blackfeather Woods I felt your shadow on the way home.

He is holding his breath. The chill in the air seeps in to his skin, prickling along his shoulders, the nape of his neck, makes his hips tremble and twitch. He takes a slow breath inward and as his ribs expand he feels the incongruity of pain shudder through his sides from where the cougar had caught him, days ago.

His ribs had been bloodied but not quite broken; bruised at the very least, leaking where the claws had caught across the bones like a xylophone. Slowly Mou inhales; slowly he exhales, and forces himself to imagine the pain ebbing with the action, meditative... And he catches a scent.

Her scent.

But when he turns to look her way—surprised to have found such a fresh sign of his beloved—the dark side of his face meets where she was standing, and he doesn't see her retreating figure, doesn't hear it either. The scent is a ghostly remnant of what once stood here; of the family they had tried to become and the home they had tried to build from the ruins of old gods. Mindlessly, he turns and sulks through the trees in the opposite direction.