welcome to the new age (read-only)

This is backdated a bit— maybe a week or so. Read-only, important to her return.

Her path back to the mountain was purposeful; despite her unsteady legs, the female knew exactly where she was going. Though the past seven months were foggy and unclear, Zombie remembered the mountain and its queen as if it had only been yesterday. It drove her, and— despite the metal lodged in her brain— being healthier than she had ever been, the grey wolf pushed herself to new limits. She avoided others, not wanting to taint her scent— wanting to return to Jinx pure and unadulterated. Wanting to renew her pledge to the woman, fully and completely. She had always been loyal to the Kesuk, to the Loa— it was only ever circumstances outside of their control that had tore them apart.

But when she arrived, the mountain was cold and empty.

She climbed and perched on one of its favored overlooks, silent and stoic. With her purpose destroyed and now replaced with a gaping, empty void— Zombie no longer knew what to do. She shut down. For hours she sat there, thinking of nothing, focused only on the movement of the sun, then the moon. When twilight embraced the land, she finally stirred— now chattering nonsensically to herself.

Zombie moved from the overlook, following the mountain paths until she reached the place that had been her own; and she began to dig, deeper and deeper in the cold and frozen earth. Her paws would be bleeding by the end of it, but the creature hardly noticed— she focused only on freeing her prize. When she left the disturbed earth, the femur rested comfortably in her jaws, though she continued to mumble around it.

Perhaps it was the Loa that told her, or perhaps it came to her because it was the only reason she could accept for the mountain's abandonment, but Zombie assumed the queen had fallen. Jinx was dead, dead, dead. Somehow, this revelation didn't shatter her world as it might have previously— instead, it gave her a new purpose. She would go to the meadow, where Jinx had first found her, where she had first pledged herself to the woman. She would beseech the Loa there to allow her to communicate with the fallen queen; and the queen would tell her what to do.

Femur in tow, the mumbling Zombie left the mountain and followed a zig-zagging path to the northeast.