Stone Circle My heart was keeping time and we were dancing on the edge of something new

He responded rightly, in his playfulness, his levity, his bend into this dance they shared. She did not need to look over her shoulder to know that he followed, like she were some star-taken youth uncertain in the end of this great pursuit -- worrying, always, if he chased some other damsel on the side, or if his eyes were only for her. No, Nanook knew her lover as much as she knew herself, and they had walked these valleys and the mountains together: both flawed, and imperfect, and wholly mortal, but he, in weakness as much as in strength, perfect to her with each step and stumble, and perfectly hers, in each morning that dawned.

The sound of her name on her lover's lips brought the sylph to a fluttering spin. She laughed in her dance, a lighted tip toe around two of the outlying stones of Stone Circle. Long shadows draped the land beneath their protective embrace, and she stood between the twin sentinels. The backlight of dawn softened the edges of her wild, windswept fur, and she called back, "Sia," into the woods that awakened to their hearts.