Blacktail Deer Plateau you shove your bright lights, big city, back where the sun don't shine

keeping some things vaguey-vague, but AW! <3

The bleakness of the days that followed had Raleska in a quiet kind of stupor. Still she kept to herself, telling none of the dark undercurrents that ran in her heart. She was of the age where trouble often settled -- and truth be told, Raleska had experienced her first taste of trouble as a whelp, and that trouble had never left.

In her paws she held the skull of a seal. It was one of the few reminders she had of home. Every now and then the wind would shift and the coast would be scented on the breeze: Raleska would close her eyes and the wind would rifle through her fur, and just for a moment she was back home on the beach with her mother and father sunning between a rout of playing puppies --

but she'd open her eyes, and that dream would close -- sharp and as thunderous as the crack of a tree striking ground.

She moved the skull over in her paws. How uncanny the teeth seemed, how deep the sockets -- Raleska wondered how it ever came to be that a skull so close to her own could belong to something that never dared leave the water.