Blacktail Deer Plateau Blood still splashes

Snow! It will probably melt overnight.

For a week or longer following her talk with Osprey, Saena had tried to pinpoint the source of that weird metallic scent on the breeze. She'd developed other descriptors for it: crisp, clean, sterile. None of them seemed to adequately describe the scent by themselves, but required the backup of other adjectives. Saena's frustration only grew whenever she caught a whiff and failed to find the scent.

It was another day of searching, and Saena'd stopped for lunch not half an hour ago. She licked her lips, dipping her head to crunch up the last of the bones from a squirrel she found in a cache. She was just snaking her tongue over her nose and contemplating a grooming session when the first white flake drifted to earth.

She spotted it between the trees, falling too slowly to be rain but too quickly to be pollen. She fixed it in her sights, watched it drop onto the ground... and then she saw another, and another. Within minutes there were hundreds of fat white flakes slowly falling between the plateau's trees. They stuck to the ground where they landed and they sat on her fur like dandruff, but that wasn't the coolest thing about it to Saena.

The coolest thing about the falling flakes was that, with their arrival, the metallic scent had spiked, and it was then that Saena realized this is what she'd been smelling on the air for the past week or so.