Nova Peak ε

Skorpa’s smile. An expression of warmth to tamper the ancestral voice. He steps aside and Ayovi approaches.
The cave opening looks mysterious. Welcoming, promising, forbidding. The sort of place that inspires puphood myths; carved from the work of water a hundred years before them. Her tail waves as she steps inside, but it freezes in mid-air and her breath catches, eyes wide.
It is only an ordinary cavern. Dark, cold, motionless. The silence is deafening. Here the walls once faceted and smooth are caked in a predator’s meals from a decade earlier. The bed is overgrown with gravel and earth and old remains. It’s still and musky and damp.
But in eyes brimful of dreaming, there is a large redcoat at the hearth dividing kootsin meat. Strong-minded girls and boys plod in through the mouth with learned profundities and too-big paws. Friendly faces behind them; pushing inside from blizzards. All this unfogged by the mere affect of pure sensation…
And him— the northman. Too different from Ashēer in how he looks. How he laughs, how he listens. How he adores.
“Skorpa,” Her eyes hold on his. Into the earth she presses her paw. Two symbols delineated; man and wife. Above she etches his shape— the long crescent above their heads.
“Is it home?”