Felltree Marsh between the trees

@Portia!

 

It was like a story. Past the river of fire, through the fields and the rivers that reflected floating firelight, was home. Or, well, somewhere that looked like home, anyway. It lacked the looming trees to filter the moonlight, and in the slowly coming dawn she lingered on the horizon, fat and burning the last of her power into the earth and the water and the mud. Antigone could have wept for joy, her body weaving through the still water and climbing fallen logs with even more ease than she walked on solid ground. She crossed the whole of the marsh in bounds and leaps until she came to it's end, standing on the perch of a broken tree, sundered in half by some force beyond her being there.

She took it all in; the mud between her paws that streaked up her tall legs, the scent of earth and musk and her own perfume, the way the sky colored pink and yellow with the coming of the sun. She could have hollered for victory — she'd done it! She'd found a place the moon had blessed herself! It was quite a feat, though nobody from home could possibly praise her for it now. Instead, she praised herself, to herself, leaping down from her perch and picking her way through the shallower waters to nose about for the first of many trinkets to make properly — moonwashed reeds and waterflowers on a scrape of bark set afloat was a sort of blessing, a sign that you'd found your place. It was a nice, comforting thing for a girl who had travelled so long in nothing but strange, strange land.