all we wanted, was a place to feel like home

Imaq · January 14, 2022, 02:19 PM

Spring had come to Teekon in the time it had taken her to fight her way back home.

Home. Such a strange thought, it distracted the northron from her surveillance of the changed landscape for a moment. She could not remember the last time she had felt such a sentiment. Perhaps not even in Salik's clan which had been so quick to turn on her for things beyond her control.

Snow still clung stubbornly, particularly here in the Taiga where the climate was always slightly cooler. Ice crusted the edges of the Qeya as she and her boy treaded the icy waters. She wondered if it could wash clean all the mistakes she had made, all the sins that seemed to cling to her skin.

Spring was stubborn though. She could smell it on the crisp air, a fresh whiff of renewal and dormant plant life preparing to burst into bloom. The scent of heat fever that grew heady as she neared the Glacier. The same scent that was beginning to envelop her own form, though she did her best to ignore the impending arrival of her estrous cycle.

It was not the same woman who had once forged a home with Wintersbane that approached the borders, not truly.

She was gaunt, even beneath the thick wool of her fluffy pelt. And there was a sunken, haunted quality to her cracked gaze that she could not shake -- even as she smiled reassuringly, tilting her gaze down to meet Siku's gilded eyes. A pain strummed through her heart, to look into those eyes so like her husband's.

Aquamarines flickered back to the gap where her leg should've been. Lost in a mountain slide. There was a measure of horror in her son's gaze as well, for which she could never forgive herself.

Would he be angry? And if so, how much? Enough to rage and send them away? Suppose he'd found another to take to wife, another woman whose body released the perfume of spring time to sire children on.

Her head lifted, gaze anxiously scouring the ice and conifers as if they might give her some clue. There was nothing for it; it was time to face the music.

Steeling herself, Imaq howled.