Shadow Mountain unpleasantville

Night fell so early these days, and that threw off his internal clock beyond how skewed it usually was; he was wired, flighty and unable to calm himself down enough to sleep, even though he knew deep down he should be trying. He roamed instead. Trying to tire himself out by hiking foreign paths laced with alien scents, like he was trying to piece together what remained of his life and make sense of it. He was in mourning and didn't know it; filled with an enduring sorrow for the loss of the forest and the inherent sadness of his beloved, which he could not cure. He knew they would need time... Maegi more-so than himself, or so he thought.

Diaspora lay claim to the hollow and their scents were thick, mixing well with the pine forest and the terroir of the stony earth; but it was claustrophobic for him, more-so than the tunnels beneath the dark wood. Stronger than when he had lived beneath the earth, plagued by the void-thing which had once tried to eat him (a bear, but, Mou's never seen things straight). He needed to get out of the area for a while and so he did, working his way down one slope or another, until he was outside the constraints of the pack's claim; he was close to the path Maegi had led him along — and at a fork in the road, he chose the other path.

There was no sense of time here; everything was blanketed with white, and the snow was falling in thin flurries like peeled dandruff. It collected across his silver shoulders, flecked the dark mask on his face with white. It was peaceful here despite the darkness that once persisted (perhaps still did), and Mou found solace in the act of creeping along in the night.