Gyrfalcon's Keep That I could be looking for

The mountain called to him. He had passed by the insurmountable range when Skellige had brought him to the white sand beaches that would become his home - and then again, as he passed through the meadow. Always the mountains loomed, immense, distant, but somehow comforting to the boy. No, not comforting - familiar maybe, or just impressive; yes, Tetsubo could be impressed by things in a vague sense. To become as tall and strong as a mountain — it was childish to believe he could be so substantial, foolish, but while he cast that thought from his mind his paws did seek out the low lying hills.

Travel wasn't smart. Not in his current state. His ribs still smarted with sharp, dedicated stabs. These reminders of his injury were all that remained, but they were persistent, and would have fouled his mood had he been anything but a sociopath. At most Tetsubo felt annoyed by his body. But he was detatched from it, more or less, seeing himself as the solidification of the dark, the nether, which had produced him. The body was only a vessel, a tool, and though it needed mending it still functioned well enough.

And so the mountains drew closer, formed a great living wall of stone and thickly growing trees, and Tetsubo picked his way between them. He sought something warm to sink his teeth in to — something that would appease his lord, or perhaps replenish the shaman's stores of herbs, as many had been utilized to mend his wounds. As the grayscale boy moved across the mountain's shifting hillside he thought he heard a call - it was unlike anything he'd heard before - and he paused, but only for a heartbeat, before being urged to continue by a strange sense of otherworldly presence. Like something drew him out from the dark of the trees.

And in the gap between the boughs, he saw the first shadow slip soundlessly across the sky. It was sickle-shaped and quick, and at first Tetsubo did not register what it could be. He thought it was a trick of the light - the wind through the trees, or perhaps a byproduct of his head injury from earlier in the week. But there was a second, then a distant third, and he loped after the soaring birds with his instincts primed.

As Tetsubo emerged from a dense copse of trees, he saw the falcons spiraling together, up, up, away, gone — and breathed a thick sigh from his crackling lungs. When his golden gaze drifted back down to earth, he saw her. A dark figure roaming about, erratic, and as Tetsubo inhaled her scent he watched her, curious but solid, as he sat like a gargoyle beneath the fronds of an oak tree.