Silvertip Mountain worn pathways

She believed that the souls of the dead clung like echos to the land they had lived in— perhaps even pieces of the souls of the living. Perhaps part of her still existed in the footsteps she had left behind in Swiftcurrent Creek, in the Sunspire, in Redhawk Caldera. Ghosts were memories of the land, and the memories of the wolves that carried them. As her bright green eyes traced the pathways up the mountain, she wondered how many ghosts continued to wind their way up and down the monolith. Thousands. Maybe even more. She shuddered at the thought, though not out of fear— simply out of the gravity of that idea. The more she grew, the smaller Magpie felt.

A shuffling of paws broke her away from these heavy thoughts, her heart fluttering slightly in her chest. An ancestor? The Corvidae believe in ghosts, believed that ancestors could occasionally manifest to bestow wisdom on their descendents. Usually that required fasting and/or ingestion of particular herbs, but stranger things had happened in their stories.

Magpie turned her head over her shoulder, breath held, green eyes sparkling. As they fell on the wolf that was arguably her best friend— despite the fact they hadn't seen each other in six cycles of the moon— a dozen emotions played behind them. Summer. A heartbeat of silence, and then as if no time had passed at all, she asked, "Do you believe in ghosts?"