Hideaway Strath Starfire

Towhee dreamed of @Wildfire. Really, it was less like a dream and more like a flashback to their run-in two years prior.

"I'm not going back in that cave. I'm—I need to be in the open," she heard her sister's voice echo, which was incredibly strange, seeing as she couldn't hear.

And instead of saying, "How come?" like she had back then, Towhee found herself trembling from head to foot as she agreed, "Me neither."

She woke with a grunt, blinking in the light of another new, bleak day. The dream lingered in her mind as she pushed herself to her feet, dragging herself a few yards away to relieve herself before going through a series of careful stretches. She was healing, though there was still a long road to full recovery.

Towhee licked her dry lips and suppressed a shudder as she kept turning the dream over in her head. It had been horrible being trapped beneath the onslaught of stones, hurt and practically suffocating. She could certainly relate to her late sister's avoidance of closed spaces, though to this day, Towhee didn't know the reason behind Wildfire's own fears.

She began to walk, slowly. There were no borders to patrol and the black humor of the situation wasn't lost on her. They had never been safer... or more isolated. Being cut off from the world was sort of nice in some small ways, though mostly it was kind of a nightmare. No wild animal likes being trapped.

She would go to the blocked pass today and see if she could climb. She knew it would be precarious at best, a suicide mission at worst. Towhee didn't want to find herself buried alive again. But there was no way to go around it or through it and it didn't make sense to dig underneath it either. The only way was up and over.

As she shuffled in that direction, she found herself crossing paths with none other than Wildfire's son. "Hey," Towhee greeted in her usual gruff manner, not bothering to sign as it made one of her forelegs ache terribly, even though it wasn't broken. She figured it was sprained or maybe she'd pinched a nerve. "Want to come be my spotter?"