Lion Head Mesa and you can sleep in a coffin, but the past ain't through with you

Solitude fit like an old glove, and months on the road had already restored Nirali to something almost like her younger self. Not quite the same, and she knew she never would be again; adjacent, perhaps, but the years had worn new lines into her face and hardened her heart in ways that would never soften. Assuming the mantle of Archon of Minrathous had left her with scars and sharpened edges and a few too many vices, and now she was a woman in her prime who had kept with her all the uncertainty and instability of her youth. Out of necessity, of course.

Small wonder she had thought to leave it all behind, and now lingered along the borders of a pack as if caught in its orbit. She kept to the far edges so that the mingled scents of wolves and coyotes were only faint, and she would not draw the ire of any patrolling pack wolves. Nirali still had a thief's heart, keenly attuned to the faintest whiff of opportunity — but the strange mountain set between barren sand and flat grassland reminded her too much of Minrathous. Disquieted, she could not bring herself to recede back into the meadow she'd come from to memorize some half-baked plan for a heist (to be abandoned halfway through, of course). This felt too strange, too unlikely and sinister to be pure coincidence.

Instead, she tilted her head back to howl for an audience.