Duskfire Glacier trust yourself

He knew this place. The paths—the shining sheet, opalescent, even with the blackness of the burning mountain. He saw the two peaks rising in to nothingness, in to blackness, but was not afraid of the fire—this second sun summoned by the dragon. There was a floral quality to the air even with the smoke and ruin. As he passed north through the lupine fields his body gathered the falling ash and left an easily discerned path.

This place should not have been familiar to him—yet it was. Seeing the spewing reds and golds from such great distance, Larus' brain transformed the red glow in to a corporeal shape. A narrow-bodied summer wolf caped in red; when he caught further glimpses of the angry mountain, the molten dragon, he saw her. This faceless firebrand. The closer he got to the glacier's monumental edge, the more he traveled between the ash-choked trees turned silver by disaster, the less and less he saw her.

He was hit with the scent of cat and wheeled about in the vapid emptiness surrounding him; there was nothing here, he realized after. The trees shuddered with the mountain's rumbling but there was nothing here that was alive except the fire, not even birds flocking from the treetops. The scent had been a ghostly remnant of a forgotten life, yet it instilled within Larus the desire to run, so run he did.

Why had she come back? Closer to the inferno? Something about the eruption, so foreign, so different from the sea. . .it appealed to her. She couldn't resist. It was the impulsive side of her that won out, in the end. 

The glacier was cool but lit in fire, and ashes were everywhere. Sleek and silver, she traveled across the ice, cold eyes flickering from sight to sight as she went. Trees, rocks, flames — man. 

Running man, bathed in red. 

Artemis gave chase, meaning to draw up alongside him. The volcano had woken a beast within her; she felt the need to spar, to fuck, to eat. . .to play. Play a game under the fiery sky, along the ice. She increased her pace, moving smoothly into a gallop.

It felt right to have the wind buffering at his coat, the scent of distant salt mingled with the falling ash and the smell of smoke; the ruin that lay behind him meant nothing, the coast that would soon be before him was likewise useless to the man that could not recall an entire life. But he hoped, somewhere deep inside of himself, that the freeing nature of the wind would awaken something more—that the smell of the sea, the sight of it, would connect more dots and give him something upon which to build. He knew only that his name was Larus, although sometimes when he woke he would feel compelled to identify himself with other names: Tryphon, sometimes.Yellowbelly, others. If he ever were to stop and think, there would be only confusion; a painful, dizzying mess to his mind.

So he would run, he would be as free as the wind for as long as he could. Let the confusion strip away from him as he went; feel the pounding of his paws against the earth, the crunch of frost beneath each stride. Soon, though, the cadence of his gait was shifting from one repetitive beat to another—something more chaotic—and when he looked to the oncoming shape, he saw a ruinous grey shadow sweeping close. He did not slow; he ran with a persistence, and found that the shape became something black as his mind locked the stranger in to a role played by someone long dead.

Larus gasped a few breaths from his hinged mouth and called out, Saghani? — but he did not know why the name had come to him, nor why his belly burned as soon as the word fled his lips. The face of the dark woman was there and then it was gone, the shine of her daffodil yellow eyes muddying, becoming something else—and then he realized, no, this wasn't some shadow from his past.