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A desperate cry woke her from shallow, fitful sleep, which she'd had much too little of lately, and Nocht sat straight up, disorientated and primed for attack. It took a few moments for her to shake the last few cobwebs of sleep from her mind and as she did her panic subsided, only for it to be replaced by a different rising fear as she translated Pilot's call. As the dire meaning hit her she scrambled to her feet and dashed for the mouth of the den she had claimed for herself, finally, the last time she had wandered into Storm, drawn by Pilot's announcement of a pack meeting.
Even before she hit the air outside she could smell the acrid stench of wood smoke, pricking at her delicate nostrils. It smelled like the fires they had set at home on too cold night and the one they'd set the day they'd rescued Ember. Side by side with Phoenix, she'd still been barely new to Storm then. It was a while ago now, suddenly. She hadn't noticed the time passing, she thought, as she saw the plume of smoke from the forest fire rise away into the sky and illuminate the far horizon. She greeted it with dread and turned back to grab her bow and, then, to leave. She paused a moment more once she'd grabbed it, poised outside the entrance of her temporary home. She couldn't see the beach from here. Even though she was a little bit upland, it was both too near and too far. She hadn't been back since the incident with the coyote, her salvation at the hand of a hybrid wolf called Conri, but it had been her place of birth unto Bleeding Souls, disgorged from a broken boat to swim up onto the coast and crawl inland to find Storm and Phoenix. She spared a moment longer to think of Phoenix, ill and immobile somewhere, but she wasn't his keeper.
She shifted to her halfling form, satisfied when her thigh wound twinged in complain, but held fast, and placing the bow between her jaws with care took off for the south, as Pilot's cry had instructed. Already the flame's smoke stung and pricked at her eyes, clogged her airways. It moved with an unearthly speed, like nothing she had ever seen before. She left her fishing rod behind, too bulky to carry in her jaws, and the beach and somewhere in all that she felt another loss.