Jade Fern Grove so you know i must, you know i must be going back to evil now

since he's lingering out of sight this is just a cameo for now. feel free to skip me & tag me if you need me. <3

the grove sakhmet leads them to is dense and serves to be a bit of a struggle for gleipnir to work his way thru. the boughs of the ferns bow easily enough for him but it is the cluster of closely packed trees that put up a fight. he almost envies the ease in which his companion elegantly weaves thru them as if she were made of smoke. he is a beast made for ice and rock and sea ...all as equally unforgiving as the last. it was not a forest that reared him into adulthood and he struggles to find the paths thru that sakhmet seems to so easily find. to him, marshes and forests were just elaborate and annoying labyrinths.

he gives pause while sakhmet goes on ahead, trusting that she will not get too far ahead of him. he looks around, a bit, stomping on leafy ferns ( perhaps in a bit of childish payback ), nosing an abandoned rabbit warren, and ensuring that his and sakhmet's trail is the only one. once he's satisfied that, yes, none have been thru this particular part of the grove recently he begins in the direction she had taken off, following her scent with ease.

steps slow, hackles bristle with a familiar feral unease, ears cup forth painfully alert as he catches sakhmet's soft voice and the voice of another. the accented words make it hard for the northerner to understand but he knows that it is a him and the defensiveness in sakhmet's voice riles him further. every fiber of gleipnir's berserker instincts tell him to rush forward, teeth unsheathed like the savage he is. but... he hangs back, fighting the twitch of every bristled hair, every taunt muscle, ensuring that he cannot be seen; though, consequentially, this means he cannot see them either.