Moonspear funerals were held all over the city

Read only.  Anyone can feel free to include finding the scene in another thread.

Tehama's memories of the past days were a blur.  Sometimes she wandered the mountain.  Sometimes she slept.  Sometimes she lay awake, unable to sleep, fending off the twin assaults of anxious thoughts and growing sense of panic.  Sometimes, rarely, she remembered to eat something, and whatever small thing she pulled from the pack's caches turned to ash in her mouth.

Always, it was cold, dark, and snowing.

It was Desdemona's death, yes.  But it was also the disfigured face of the tawny female whose name Tehama hadn't learned.  It was Keres who had met Tehama upon the borders, helped to bring her into Moonspear's embrace.  It was the spray of blood upon the snow and the empty eye sockets and the missing jaw and the smell of death and stench of bear and all of those sensory demons that haunted her.  And it was the crushing weight of the brutality, the realization of her own mortality, the oppressive weather, the cold and empty darkness.

It was different, when her father had died in the volcanic rockslide.  He'd died valiantly, saving others, and quickly, without cruelty.  And young Tehama had never seen his crushed body, and it was different, losing a parent, in a way.  Everyone lost parents, eventually.  But losing others your own age, in a way so horrific and cruel and painful?  Gone, in the blink of an eye, and before Tehama could reach them to render aid?  She wasn't so selfish to think this was her fault or that she should have prevented it somehow.  But she was guilty enough she felt it should have been her.  Desdemona, Keres, the others injured or killed -- they had purpose here, they were family.  She was a newcomer, and lacking skills, lacking blood relations.  It should have been her.

Thus the thoughts that plagued her incessantly, like ravens swooping down to steal flesh from a beast mortally wounded but still living.  And though she fended them off momentarily, the thoughts, like the ravens, kept returning.

The thoughts kept her from sleep.  The sleeplessness made her restless.  The restlessness led her from her makeshift shelter within a mountainside crevass.  The night was black, the hour indeterminate.  A faint grey in the east spoke of the possibility of dawn, but daybreak would go unseen for the thick cloudcover and still-driving snow.  Still, a walk, a climb to clear her mind, to wear out the muscles, to leave her so tired that exhaustion might claim her?  That might work.

Tehama was a mountain creature, born and raised, and returned to an alpine lifestyle after too long away in the lowlands.  The climb should not itself pose a challenge.  But brutal winds buffetted the she-wolf as she ascended Moonspear's heights.  Ice made normally-confident footholds treacherous.  Snow crafted deceptive bluffs that hid unstable crags that wouldn't hold a wolf's weight, even a petite woman like Tehama.  The moaning of the storm would drown out any noise of startlement or cry.

Later in the morning, the tumultuous clouds would part for a brief moment.  Weak, grey-gold sunshine would break through, illuminating the mountainside.  A jagged gash in the snow, not yet covered over with fresh snowfall, would be a shadow—something that had slid haphazardly down the mountainside—punctuated with the crimson stain of blood, gleaming ominously in the meager sunlight.  (No broken form lay there, but then, what were the odds of surviving such a fall?  Perhaps buried already in the snowdrifts.) 

Then the clouds would churn and darken again, eclipsing the morning light, and snow would begin to cover over every imperfection.