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Her eyes found the surroundings to be particularly pleasing this time of year; it had been lightly snowing all night, leaving Anathema’s territory with a slight dusting of white. It would melt by the time the sun would rise to the middle of the sky, but it was beautiful to look at right now nonetheless. Naniko often found beauty in odd places and in odd things; to her, her cave home was the most gorgeous thing that she had ever seen. The way that the firelight flickered across the golden walls, the cool stone floor beneath her feet…even the nearly constant howling of the caves was a welcoming sound to her alabaster ears. It was her home, where she and her pack lived and worked together each day.
The usually gruff female was not good at sharing her emotions with other canines, and she wondered if they knew how much she appreciated them and the work that they did. She would have to remind herself to praise them more often, especially those who had occupied rank tiers. Those were canines who were truly working hard for the benefit of the pack. Caring for animals, protecting the borders, keeping the fires lit so that the cave dwellers could see…each role had an important place in the life of the Anathema pack.
Naniko blended in with the snow a bit as she padded through Dawn’s Breath and past the borders of her pack. She wanted to explore the areas just outside of the borders, primarily the Dampwoods, to search for different sorts of prey animals. She’d had the idea of trying to domesticate reindeer or moose in the area for riding and so that they could do work for the pack (pulling and clearing trees, clearing boulders) but hadn’t been able to locate a herd yet.
The female was in optime form, her preferred form, her hair plaited into one long braid that hung over her shoulder in front of her. She wore no clothing, her only adornment being a necklace that her daughter had made for her, her gris-gris, and a plain weapons-belt that was cinched tightly around her curvy waist. Upon it were her usual weapons: two poison-tipped daggers, one ceremonial dagger for the Rite of Agares (the blood-sharing joining ritual that each pack member went through when they came to live in Anathema), and one long axe. Jade eyes looked about at the surroundings before fixing back to the land in front of her, feet moving quietly over the snow as she inhaled, trying to find the scent of any nearby moose.