The days shortened, and the cold deepened. Every night's chill seemed to bite just a little deeper and she arose from her bed in the cover of moss and thick trees, alone and bleary-eyed, as dawn crept its way across the horizon. Amekaze moved slowly, stretching, and beginning to work towards full awareness.
She peered around with a small sigh. Eventually her path would head towards the borderlands and then beyond to keep working on her plant gathering, but she was not ready for that yet; she still felt the chill of the night and no amount of fluffing up her fur was seeming to ease it away. The cold evenings were increasingly lonely and her insistence on not inhabiting a proper den (and instead a crook of large roots) likely did not help her any.
In winters prior she had either simply toughed it out or had company to share her sleeping spaces with. Ways back, it had always been her mother she could curl up alongside to keep warm even at the high elevations of Rikudou. And, more recently at even just a handful of months ago, she had been growing used to sharing Ferdie's company for such means, although it had not been all that cold then... She frowned. This then led her to wonder if any others were feeling the same way, or would be in time to come..
Nevertheless, she yawned, stretched again, and picked her way through the foliage towards the edge of this treeline where it opened up to a sloping meadow. As the morning brightened, she set out with a moseying gait to gather more plants -- whether she knew what all of them did or not.
![[Image: 5ifpFkc.png?1]](http://i.imgur.com/5ifpFkc.png?1)
i want to bleed in the 「r a i n」