500+
Since her return to Dahlia, Cwmfen had seldom assumed the bipedal form. Once more, the natural form in which she had been born was enough for the black Warrior. It was in this form that she had learned first the most simple and yet most effective way of the warrior. What she had gathered and then practiced for countless hours daily within that humanesque form had been learned by her keen mind and the observations of her father in her early years. The way of the sword and the spear had been discovered by the young Cwmfen when she had fought in the battles between the tribes of Caledonia. And she had learned well those ways, those ways of humans that the wolves had curiously adopted. And she had made use of those ways most frequently because of a coyote that she had fallen in love in. But now, traveling in solitude as she once had, the form that she had been born in was enough.
The black fae moved through the dim hours of the dawn. It had been raining, and the song of the weeping world lifted within her soul with ever drumming of the tears upon the earth and leaves, upon her fur, upon her mind. The rain washed away the dust she had gathered, but the rain washed away what could not be seen as well. Each storm was a cleansing, different from the cleansing that she took within the pools. The rain was not the domain of Nemain but of the Morrigan as a whole, and in the rain, and in the world, she could hear the song that moved her soul and life force: the song of War. As a tenebrous shape, silent and hungering, the Raven Warrior breathed quietly, each breath drinking in the tones of those songs. Her soul sang softly with the world, and she felt a Peace that she had not felt in a long time. It was a Peace that was different from that strange emotion ‘Love’. This Peace was lighter in shade, gentler in touch. It was one that a Warrior could be satisfied in. And somehow, just as before, the Warrior felt as if she had arrived upon these lands just too late to fight. Too late to fight in a War. That was what that Peace sang to her.
Cwmfen had crossed the Dahlian boarders, but she paused now, the woad-banded maw raised as if in question to the lightening winds. Those black ears lifted as if hearing something in the far distance, but only the silence of the Ethereal Eclipse, welcoming the Warrior, ensued. The one-eyed Raven, his beak shattered, cut the silence with his cry, and the pied creature took his place upon the wolf’s shoulder. Fluidly, the Warrior continued, her paws walking with quiet, dancing steps that carried her to the cold pools of the dark woods. She must visit a different water and taste a different domain in which her gods dwelt.