Emberwood I got years of livin' by and how I choose

The view was one he'd seen a hundred times in a hundred places, but one he appreciated nonetheless. It was perhaps the very reason he rambled, this desire to see one vista after the next. The urge to climb new and distant mountains and look down on strange and different lands.

He allowed Eleuthera to direct his gaze on the panoramic tour. Her hidden willows were duly noted, as was the 'garden' that he'd so recently fled. The running plains, the silver moraine — Kincaid tried in vain to picture these places, and instead succeeded in imagining the various activites the woman mentioned. A young girl toddling after her mother, or an even slighter version of his new acquaintence dashing through the tall grass, or limping along with an equally pretty brother.

He thought of his own brother and looked up at the sky, wondering where he was and what he was doing, and if he thought of Kincaid as often as Kin thought of him.

Eleuthera drew him out of these thoughts as she withdrew, and turned her pretty face up toward his. Her melancholy was different from but adjacent to his own;

"Sometimes I get t'thinkin' about all the places I've left behind," he told her, trying to subtly disengage from the eye contact he wanted a little too dearly. He bowed and stretched and shifted his slim hindquarters down after, hanging his paws off the edge of the rock. "There's places I know I ain't ever gonna see again. Great places. Great people," he looked up at her, and then, somewhat bashfully, back down at the sweep of the valley floor. "But there's ten thousand places past this one, and I suppose here I'd say — there's ten thousand days past today. Everythan's gotta end someday. That's just the way of things. But new things start, too."

Oh, lord. He needed to get out of there before he fell all over his fool self. But there was no way to extract himself from her velvet presence; he looked up at her and found himself stuck again, caught up in a kinship contrived of his own desperate loneliness. She was far too kind, far too lovely for the likes of him.