in this world it's hard to get it right.

There were many points upon which she agreed with Peregrine when it came to their talk about what had happened between her and Elwood. First and foremost was the simple fact that she desperately needed to apologize to her co-beta. While she'd felt brave enough to do so in the presence of her alpha, once he had gone her courage had failed her again, and so she turned away from the Caldera to seek the refuge of solitude so that she could lick her wounds and talk herself back down from the ledge. Instead, she set her course to the South and steered herself around the edge of Lake Rodney. It was a path she'd taken only once before, but thought of then as a result of a retrospective comparison to the Peregrine of this conversation versus the Peregrine that had come to laugh at her while she was high on shrooms in the forest she now was stepping lightly through.

At the time, the forest had seemed dark and haunted. Now in the morning light with Winter's glow settled throughout it was actually beautifully ethereal. The trees stood tall from the ground like bones, all covered in frost that shone yellow and pink from the rising sun. While Finley wasn't usually one to admire the scenery, she felt almost like a different wolf as she whispered through the trees like an ashen shade, her heart, body and mind all just exhausted from all she'd put herself through the past few days.

There seemed to be a pretty decent amount of little creeks and streams reaching between the trees like long fingers, pooling here and there as the ground dipped and rose. It was next to one of these little pools that she stopped and stretched out in the snow. She settled her head upon her arm and sighed heavily, too physically tired to continue her walk. It was her intention to set her mind again to the task of sorting through her emotions and writing the script for her apology to Elwood, but she quickly realized she still was just as mentally weary as physically. So, she contented herself with staring out across the pool and watching the changing colors of the sunrise reflect back at her upon the thin sheet of ice that covered it.