“I thought you didn’t want to spy,” Vesper muttered, her voice only barely audible as she leaped from one rocky outcropping onto another. Melted snow made the stones slick, but her pale paws quickly found traction on the dirt and grass covering the adjacent slope. She skidded a few feet before breaking out into a short lope toward the next horizontal plane, doing her best to keep moving so she wouldn’t tumble down the mountainside.
“Stark not saying spying,” came the cawing correction from overhead. “Stark saying watching silly boy. Doing, no?”
She snorted, blue eyes rolling as she made the next leap. This section of the mountains was not particularly treacherous, but travelers needed to either know the land instinctively or be extremely attentive in order to cross. Luckily, both during her time as a loner and as a scout of the coyote clan, the female had grown to know Halcyon like the back of her paw. She knew the different forest landmarks on the foothills, the paths through shrubbery in the mountains, and the places were streams crossed through rock.
She was headed toward one of the streams now, ready for a break after her climb. As much as she was growing fond of Inferni territory and its members, she’d stayed inside the borders for too long, and her wanderer’s legs were dying to be stretched. She doubted she would be traveling for more than a day and night, as she had no objectives in mind to accomplish while she was out here, but it was nice to explore familiar yet fresh scenery. While Inferni was never-changing, the same faces popping up in the same places, the neutral territories were host to a multitude of new smells and traces of strangers going about their own mysterious lives.
The mountain brook was reached, babbling quickly as it trickled over rocks, dipping in miniature waterfalls. It wound serpentine around some shrubs, one of which had been recently marked by a virile wolfdog. She gave that man-reeking bush a wide berth and dipped her muzzle close to the water, allowing her pale eyes to shut as she lapped the refreshingly cold liquid into her mouth.
The raven croaked suddenly from a nearby tree; she had all but forgotten about his presence but now lifted her head with irritation sharpening her angular features. Its wings were half unfurled, however, as if frozen in preparation to take off. “Wolf coming,” it informed her, and she turned her head quickly, large ears swiveling.
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