She sat at the mouth of the cave watching the sunset through the trees. Her thumb ran over her fingers repetitively as she tried to ease the soreness in the joints. The wilting light was not the same shade as the dawn she had arrived in. There was no red, but more of a soft pink that swelled behind splatters of deep orange. It bled between the dark stripes of tree trunks and eventually died just before hitting the small clearing she perched in.
Lana would have liked a place closer to the blueness of the sea. From where she had settled now there wasn’t even a shimmering smudge of a lake nearby. But the cave was large and secluded, away from the exasperating noise of the pack. Her dark claws still felt heavy with the dirt she had scraped from the least slanted wall to structure shelves for her supplies. The work was slow and made her fingers itch with aching.
The approaching night still tasted of winter and hints of sweating snow banks lurked close by. Wind chilled her fur and made Lana rethink the desire to live by the sea. Darkness gnawed on her back and somewhere inside the belly rested the lynx, her bright eyes closed but ears flicked forward. So when Lana finally stood, Cas seeped from the black immediately. Her bag followed the swift movement and flapped in the pinkish light.
She tried to think of an emotion at least once a day. That morning it was something close to anxiety - even if it wasn’t. Recently, Lana had decided that feeling nothing was hardly a feeling at all. It was like someone had sliced the vein that produced fear, excitement, and joy from her body. And she didn’t remind herself who it was. That would come another night when the comfort of cigarettes could bother her with their drowsiness. For now, she walked towards the setting sun.
This wasn’t her first walk of the new territory. The intoxicating scent of poisonous plants had drawn her out of the cave every night as if there were strings tied to her ankles. A familiar flapping of journal papers against her leg reminded her of the task at hand. They danced and snapped at the ground, weighted with hundreds of lines of tiny writing on each page. Herb names flashed before Lana as her rebelliously amber eyes devoured every leaf visible. These had been recorded. No choice but to move further.
The woman stifled a sigh, unwilling to let her breath cloud the air. She paused a moment to root for the small pencil in her satchel. Items bumped against the stiff leather which had yet to dry properly from continuous days of use. Having found what she needed, Lana padded on with her opposite hand outstretched to feel the rough bark and malleable feathers of ferns. Her mind wandered for a moment, as if searching for peace or a name to her feeling. But she closed it off with a clench of her fist that now hung disappointedly at her side. A small sprout caught her sharp gaze and Lana knelt in the drying mud to examine it more closely.
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