Herbalists' Cache i never meant to be a savior

She thought of home often, at times like these. When the sun sank close to the horizon and caressed it as if they were long lost lovers, painting the skies with vibrant shades with practiced strokes from a millennium of practice. But here, they didn't seem as vibrant. Especially not so when she could not see them, lost within the confines of some great forest that still yet paled in comparison of the towering ones from which she hailed, where colors were far more bountiful than they were here. Here her vision saw only shades of monotonous white and black, of browns and blacks and blues and muted greens but nothing beyond that. She missed the purples, the oranges, the yellows, the sun-kissed golds. She missed a lot of things about home but... as the she-wolf studied the odd forest surrounding her, she knew she was far, far from home.

The trees were odd here, she noted. They did not have broad leaves with which to soak in the warm rays of sun that weaved through the thick canopies; their leaves were not leaves at all, rather thin needles that blanketed the ground and formed a carpet that felt odd beneath her cracked and aching pads. The first time she had stepped foot in a forest like this, she had marvelled at these odd leaves, like needles. They had been foreign and new, something to be studied and marvelled at by her foreign eyes. Now it wasn't quite the same, though she still found herself pondering their oddness from time to time. She knew they were called 'pine,' a word snapped at her from a passerby that had seen her gawking at them.

"What, never seen a pine tree?" No, actually, she hadn't. But she had already run off by then.

Admittedly, her thoughts did not wholly belong to home or to the forest. They largely belonged to her hunger, that which curled like a beast in her bowels and preyed upon the meat on her bones. Winter was not a kind mistress to creatures like her, so frail even in the best of health that her life hung at the mercy of Chance. So far, Chance had been merciful to let her live moments longer. Winter, however, seemed to be preying on her luck. She hadn't found food for well over a week and a half now, her frame reflecting it. She looked skinny, albeit not overtly so. It was enough that she still struggled to continue going on for a destination that she didn't know the location of.

That was a lie; she had no destination at all.

She was just a lonely wolf in a lonely forest, wishing she could see the horizon through the cracks between the trees. But she couldn't, the trees too dense for her to see much beyond them at all. It made her want to cry. She was lost, wasn't she? Lost and cold and hungry and so, so alone. Just thinking of it made her all too aware of the coldness that smothered her bones, the little wolf trembling like a leaf in one of the many rough storms that had ravaged the coast. Though her father had hailed from the North, though maybe not quite as north as here, she bore a coat that was thin and meant for eternal summers. Her mother had once whispered to her on one late night that she had been born silver before the sun had woven sunshine in her pale fur and claimed her as its own. Maybe her mother spoke true and that was why she could not bear the cold now, with the sun lost from her view.

She had been wandering, then, looking for somewhere to hunker down for the night and pray that she woke up to see the dawn once more. She didn't pay any mind to her surroundings, too focused on her goal. She normally would have been far more alert, too paranoid to take even a moment to relax because she was too worried about whatever creature that may want to rip her flesh apart lurking around the odd corner. Now, though, she was sure that her nose was too numb to smell anything and she would bet her last few heartbeats that her ears had frozen and fallen off exactly three days ago.

She would regret this bet, especially as something familiar touched the pale wolf's ears.

( Something familiar, here? She didn't believe it. She couldn't. )

But it was familiar, wasn't it? Familiar, but foreign. She knew that voice, or maybe she once had. It was changed, now. No longer that of the boy she had once known in her youth, a boy she had not thought of but for the worst nights when she wanted to feel even a sliver of happiness and thought of her childhood. But this wasn't the voice of a boy, she noted, since it lacked the jovial tones of youth. They were gone, now, for the most part, replaced by the roughness of hardship and adulthood.

It was then that she turned, pale eyes that seemed too at home in the icy north wider than the moon. So her ears had not deceived her, had they? Though her lungs betrayed her, refusing to take in the cold air as she stared. There he was, someone she had not seen for a long, long time. A boy who was no longer quite a boy anymore, she noted. But she was no longer a girl, was she? She shouldn't be surprised by the change and yet, she was. Maybe it was the North that had changed him, she wasn't sure. If it was, the North had changed him quite a lot. Not enough, though. Not enough for her to not recognize him despite the time and land that had once distanced them.

"Kukulkan?" she asked in turn, her voice soft and struggling to form the complexities of speech. She had not spoken in a long time, not proper words beyond whines and yelps and the like. Yet here she was, talking once more with a voice that had not been heard by many. "Is it you? Truly?" Are you real? Is this real?

She wasn't sure.