Northstar Vale nameless, faceless

This place was nothing like Mereo.

Leona woke up every day at the crack of dawn, the soldier's hour you could call it. The first few times she woke up confused by the scents in the air, the mosaic quality of the treetops, the views she did not recognize; the lack of movement, too. Nobody else was awake at the time or if they were, their patrol routes were hidden from her.

She saw everything through the lense of Mereo: this place was too green, the air was too thin, too cold, too wet; all that Leona sought was familiarity, and before that came in the routine of her training schedule, with the other kids. She didn't have that here.

By the late morning Leona was outside of her new home, pacing, kicking at a rock she'd found, imagining that it was the punishment stone; but in a fit of frustration she kicked it especially hard, and listened to it skip and roll in to the grass.