Chimera Fields Roast Mutton

These unfamiliar lands had Cèilidh keeping low. A mild breeze tickled through her fur and the grasses swayed around her, and she understood the beauty of the fields written in the golden cast of the sun. The way the butterflies danced in the evening air, and the way the warmth pulled a sweetness from the grass she imagined tasted different in the rain. Yet she noted, too, that these grasses were hardly tall enough to conceal her, and the warnings of her parents rang like a mantra through her ears, even though she knew she had left their presence on the island, when she had plunged into the inky sea and had cut through the waves toward the coast.

That world is not safe, and even though she thought them wrong, she felt ashamed at how she scoffed at them now. She turned her thoughts to the present again; she needed her focus here.

The newness overstimulated her - the sights, the scents, the sounds - and she tried to take them in one at a time, but they intermingled and talked over each other, until her gilded eyes drifted a little to late across the likeness of a wolf to her right - and she caught herself inhaling with a sharp, "Oh," and tucked herself nearer to the ground.