Blackfeather Woods and she was a war zone of a woman

the man that emerges from the shadows looks to tzar like he had been made from them in his entirety. a sentry of this place to be given wolven form and flesh. ghost nips at his right ear and tzar rolls his eyes at his feathered companion. i see him, i'm not blind ghost. the teenager grumbles, wondering if at the rate the falcon was going would end up nipping the tip of his ear off completely. how his mother dealt with it was beyond tzar.

the voice that comes from the stranger is as grizzled as he is, using a strange analogy that earns a small tilt of tzar's head. focusing on that instead of the warning: that there was danger lurking in the dark woods. but that seemed ridiculous to tzar: there was danger everywhere.

sounds like something the wicked witch of the woods might say, drawls the crownore princeling, all snark with nothing to back it up. well, nothing beyond a falcon that lets out a low trill of a warning at him. tzar didn't speak falcon but he was pretty sure his trusty knight in feathers was telling him to shut his mouth.

i'm not running from anything, tzar corrects; haughty. sharply. i'm looking for — saying it out loud might make it more real. for a place called bearclaw valley. apparently, my father and siblings died there. he'd been so young, his memory was unreliable and his mother, though he trusted her to tell him the truth, he hopes she'd been in such a frightened state of fight or flight when she grabbed him that she hadn't been right on what she thought she saw.