Sun Mote Copse Landlocked.

@Niamh, @Phox, @Towhee.

The lucid darkness watched him as he roamed ever further from the sea's edge, clamboring through one wooded hillock in favor of another, until he was left out in the open upon a plateau. From the plateau he could see the stars; they watched him in silence, the moon a crooked crescent.

Alizarin breathed deeply of the brisk air, testing it, and then scowled when he found the faintest tendrils of familiar, repulsive sea. A northerly wind carried it from the coast. He chose to duck among some conifers and continue on at a quicker pace, eager to be free of it. His coat did well to blend with shadow or with the piled autumn leaves; he made his way along, slowing only when the same salted wind corrupted his path and hid the moon behind some cloud.

He crossed a bog, and then was left in the middle ground between legs of densely over-watered marshland. The mud slicked his limbs, matted his typically wild-kept coat in places where it usually hung loose and jagged (a slight improvement over the norm, to be sure). The young man was in a foul mood as he came upon the second winding waterway, partially because of how cold the air felt upon his skin. So very much like the sea.

He could never get far enough away from it, it seemed.

Before him nested a copse and he sought it for shelter, but could not settle. There were many scents woven in to the tapestry of th forest and the strongest among them were wolf scents, setting him on-edge. He would not sleep tonight; but then, Alizarin was used to that. He back-tracked along the muddied route he'd made and then reclined upon a pile of withered leaves, satisfied momentarily by their crunch.