The morning air was tepid, almost as if spring had come upon them quite early, but Quetzalcoatl knew that could not be so. Still, the early rise of the sun into the horizon painted gray with the thick, omnipresent clouds that obscured the brilliant colors of the dawn to her eyes, left the Amazon Queen with the feeling of a heavy weight upon her shoulders. The cloudy day would do no wonders for her mood, nor the strain that denying herself to even see, even a fleeting glimpse, of her precious Pilli placed upon her. The resistance she instilled in herself everyday, believing it to be patience that when the time was right she would seek him out with the purpose of seeing him, to press her nose against his neck and know that he was truly alive and well, and to convince him to return to Coatl's Rise as was his destiny was a great one but Quetzalcoatl was well practiced at denying herself things that she wanted. The War Queen understood sacrifice better than her privileged birth had given anyone the ability to believe. She was Tezcacoatl's mother and there should not have needed to be sacrifice when it came to her baby boy, her precious one, but the simple fact was that even for Queens the world did not cease to spin and things did not work the way she wanted them too. Even she, at the end of the day, had to face the harsh whiplash of reality.
Though thoughts of her Tezcacoatl rarely ceased, pining to see her son again in the only way a mother could, Quetzalcoatl had not lingered far from the northern breaches that she had entered these savage lands from. It was not fear that kept her in a relative area, for she feared nothing except losing her son — though her women might disagree with her there was nothing more precious to her, not her own life; and she had always spoke that if they had daughters (or sons) then they might understand. She may have never been meant to love Tezcacoatl as he'd been meant for a slave as soon as his sex had been discovered but her heart would not let her. She would not see his beautiful chocolate fur ruined by the daily expectations of those lesser and indefinitely lower than them, would not wish to see his face, so handsome even when he'd been naught but a suckling newborn disfigured by the scars that the slaves bore to mark them and to remind them. Quetzalcoatl had never thought of herself as a weak women, did not grow up in a culture nor a pack where women were the weak ones, but her love for her son was her largest weakness; and yet she indulged herself to believe it was also her strongest asset.
Still, she lingered, hesitant to venture further south though the urge struck her on numerous occasions to investigate these lands that her son must have called a temporary home. She was curious as to what drew Tezcacoatl here, and what gravitated him to stay when his throne was awaiting him. She had allowed him to leave a boy so that, guided in the right direction by the women whom she had entrusted his life with, her best and most loyal, he might return to Coatl's Rise a man, ready to lead the Amazon pack into a new era. The moment she had kept him for herself, selfish but with nothing short of fierce love, brazenly bestowing him with a 'Coatl' name Quetzalcoatl knew that she had changed all the rules — but it had never felt wrong. She was unsure if Xiuhcoatl would send word of any type by messenger, but Quetzalcoatl doubted it. Her sister, only a Princess except in the times of war when they shared the title of Queen, one playing diplomat and the other playing strategist knew what she was doing and the Amazon Queen did not worry too much in her absence; especially now that she had Vali, the king of the Viking pack Odinn's Cove directly under her paw right where she had wanted him all along.
The youngest of Eitri's children was the most easily swayed, romanced easily by false promises of power and a little femme charm. There had been talk, Quetzalcoatl had heard before she had left, that his brother, Ragnar, the middle son — Eitri's only son that was actually a true danger to her and her women, she had always believed — ruled here in these lands. It occurred her to pay the once handsome Northman a visit. As a young girl she had been charmed by him, though he was younger than she by a few months, but she had been naive and innocent, boldly wondering about the opposite and lesser sex. No one knew of those secret meetings, and no one but the Viking and her would ever know what had transpired during them. Those were secrets that Amazon Queen intended to take to her grave. She had been a little girl, foolish and he had offered a distraction from the never ending lessons of her strict mother.
In time, she would pay him a visit, as any good Queen would do. He had once been her a friend, and then her greatest enemy. What he was to her now, she did not know. He was too far away from her Rise to be neither enemy nor friend which was not, she acknowledged as she ceased her steps near the small cache she had begun to build for herself near her den, temporary though it all was within the Emberwood, and begun to dig the loosely packed earth in search of what she had caught the night before to serve as her breakfast so that she could spend the day exploring.