Duskfire Glacier flame of the heart

omg no don't worry!! i've been absent, and i lost the first draft of this bc laptop is on last leg i think ):< (also u can rough her up a lil if u wanna if it comes to that idc)

She scraped for a focus, but her mind was drawn in too many directions all at once. Aggressively she tried to read the landscape in a vain attempt to predict the best route to take, and of course, given her dedication to gaining speed, this proved difficult. Overloaded, and fighting off an unfamiliar sense of dread, she decided to  just keep going. She pinned her ears and ran.

Somewhere over the wild pounding of her heart, she noticed her rhythm was now alone -- the cat's footfalls had.. backed off? Curiosity certainly got the better of her and she looked back as swiftly as she could, which yielded her mixed answers. The cat was no longer in obvious hot pursuit.. but the lack of visual confirmation on the wretched thing did well to inspire uneasiness. She didn't feel like this hunt had been abandoned, and half-slid down a steep little hill that fed into a thick copse of trees. Ame had to weave and wind a new path, and this cost her speed, but once past it, she loosed into a trot then a canter, now finding a path towards the south.

Often she glanced around her, back in the direction she'd last seen her hunter. The scenery did her no favors and only darkened with the cover of trees. She hoped for an upcoming waterway, or a break in the foliage, but neither came so far. Eventually it would have open into a valley..

It would be a while before she could trust that she had shaken the cat, so until then, she simply kept going away.