wc: 443
Geography wasn't Caspa's strong point. In her mind, the world was a linked chain of familiar places, with lots of blurry white space in between. The longest thread of all stretched back to her birthplace, that far off settlement of high fences and tall trees, but the thread that linked her to that place was long and frail and indistinct, as if buried in a snow drift, which was a vague impression left over from the midwinter land she'd travelled to get to 'Souls. Then there was the mountains, the forest, and the Court. And that was everything.
But now, as if unrolling a brand new ball of string behind her, Caspa was venturing far to the north. She was well aware that her reclusive behaviour left her out of the loop in terms of pack events - though she was starting to wonder if it was simply that her packmates were living a similarly quiet life - but she had not escaped the rumours of changes in the nearby territories. It all seemed so vague to her. The only other pack she knew much about was the one beyond the woods, Krystalle's Cercatori something, and the whispers did not concern this particular group. So the stoic willowy wolf-dog had taken it into her own paws, feeling a desperate need to get a grasp on this political world she had blundered into, and was leaving the beach to her back, letting her jerking-heron stride move her surprisingly quickly cross-country, only stopping to scavenge for carrion where she scented it out and felt like chasing birds away, like an unnervingly animated scarecrow.
When dense forest started to offer glimpse of granite cliffs, she faced the mountain that had been both her saviour and her imprisonment as she breached the impenetrable ice-pass and could not find her way back. To her mind, the mountain was the limits of the land and she had no idea about passage to the west. As far as she could tell, she was as far as she could go, and there was no sign of a foreign settlement. The woods were still thick but now there were more stones and cliffsides, as the elevation rapidly began to increase. She found a pile of boulders with a strange white rock atop and stepped lightly up them, resting a foot on the pinnacle and observing quite a large portion of the not-too-distant Halcyon range. There seemed no point in going further; she should be getting back. It would take more than a night and a day, if she stopped to rest or scout further.
.fred-caspa { font-family:verdana, geneva, sans-serif; font-size:10px; line-height:15px; padding-bottom:23px; text-align:justify; width: 380px; margin:0px auto;}
.fred-caspa p {text-indent:15px;}
</style>[/html]