Bearclaw Valley So raise your glass now and celebrate exactly what you've done.

I was thinking about how Ikkalrok was too dead to name her kids, and since Astara is non-verbal she likely wouldn't, so I'm gonna have Glaucos name himself.. sometime in this thread.

There was a big void in the trees. He'd been staring at it for a while now, wanting to visit the copse standing near the middle of the valley, but also afraid to do so. The void was round and tall; bigger than a wolf and with a deeper smell.

The closest he got was a few feet shy of the trailing dirt path leading in to it. He huddled beside the narrow tail of the path which wound towards a hill, staring at the dirt. There in the mud sat a massive depression: longer than any wolf print he'd seen, with large claw-marks curving off of it.

The boy sniffed at the shape a few times and stared off at the distant shadow-heavy trees, deciding at the last minute to investigate anyway, but he did not approach them. Instead he travelled opposite: along that recursive path towards the hill, where grass became gravel, then stone, and was surprised when the smell got even stronger.

He'd followed it in reverse thinking he was going somewhere safer—but beyond where he stood, among the limestone and gypsum and clinging soggy moss, was a dark hole.