Stavanger Bay Memories that Drive me

I'm not sure what happened here. I just went with it. Territory of Shield Maiden's Sorrow (Watefall)

Ash Paw strode from the lands of the ravens. Past the forest's cold call. The darkness that crept upon her and the bony fingers of winter's cold winds blown. She was colored in splashes of red and brown, upon her pelage of tawny and black. Blood and gore upon her paws, and maw. She had not slept for a day or two.  A restless energy tearing her apart as she moved and hunted for the creatures that would fill their caches, and appease her gods. 

A fevered sense of time running out had played along her mind for days. She was fearful of what the autumns winds would bring upon their colored heels. The white of snow was coming, and she was ill prepared.

So it was with such thoughts and sorrow that she found herself traversing the forest and the shores of where her auntie had once tread. She did not have a connection to the dirt and the trees as Thistle had, but to Thistle herself she held a deep sense of something. She had loved her auntie in her own way and Thistle had accepted her just the way she was. Here and now she was unable to find that same connection, that same acceptance and it filled her chest with pain.

She traveled and shifted and found the cliff side that her auntie had told her of, where she had found the scarred norsewoman, dead and gone. Valhalla she had moved. 

Where she too crept and wept and stood over ceremony atop the wide sweeping cliffside of Sheild Maiden's Sorrow. As if a weeping mother embracing a broken child, or a warrior woman as she waited for her mate to come home. This is what the name reminded her of.

Slowly she crept and allowed the icy falls to splash upon the rocks and thus upon her. The blood and gore that had marred her, slowly slipping from her pelage, as if whirling from a cocoon, and it was there that she simply sat long after the cold had taken her feeling. Long after she could no longer hold her position and without a nary worry in the world, she pulled upon years of drive and body honed for what it was, and she leapt.

She hit the water like a tidal wave, the cold freezing her limbs and stealing her breath. She swayed with the water as it moved, her body she couldn't uncurl. She simply closed her eyes and waited for whatever the gods would deem to happen to her, and slowly she was spat upon the shore. Her body half in and out of the water.

Shivering from head to toe, she didn't move. She merely lay there, cool clear water tracing dainty circles around her eyelashes. Her pelt sopping and slipping along every curve and whither. Dipping deep into valleys of shadow, and highlighting all her blemishes and all her charms. The sun began to rise upon the sky, beating upon her, drying her. And still she lay. Numb, but content. For her gods had sparred her again.