Under Paw | Shelha Series 4 | ✔

Caradel

Winter flipped open the stone slice just inside her doorway, brushed aside the crystal bottles and their crystal contents, and pried back the hidden door behind them. Her broken caradel stone, its back still chipped, was lifted like a piece of glass. She held it up to the one from the renegades. Broken edges grated, then slipped into place. The crack between them disappeared.

Isipho's eyes are never dry,

And weep like orbs of morning sky,

Ensconced within the shadows

Where the kindest actions live and die.

Isipho's eyes, by Jiehu slashed

Did shatter like a crystal glass,

Each piece alive, but living only

In a heart tested and passed.

Jiehu too inhabits hearts

And bends their wishes nigh apart

Into a weapon now to finish

What a blinding blow did start.

When Jiehu finds a way to rise,

Isipho too gathers and tries

To save the one who then has fallen

Prey to Jiehu's three red eyes.

Winter carefully returned both halves to the alcove. She tapped each crystal bottle, just to be sure, but they were all stable. Then she was back in her camp, down the ring road and into the forest. Great bounds carried her through snow impassable to her army. Drifts crept halfway up the trunks of trees and dipped to the roots of others. Skeletal branches etched the sky. The clouds were thick and grey, though Glass Moon—named for its skies—had begun the night before. In the snow, the new moon hunt had been cancelled.

Winter stopped beneath a tree and listened to the hush in the forest. If she stayed here long enough, her mind would begin to hallucinate, filling in the vast, empty sensory space with noises of its own invention. But not yet.

It took until midafternoon to reach the first signs of the Darkwood. Winter scavenged a bird from the remains of an Aria's web, then turned east with an air of confidence. She was rewarded; in time, jagged peaks began to rise from the drifts. Sculpted by the wind over toothy rocks, they leaned southward at impossible angles. Winter followed the pointing fingers of the snow.

It was evening by the time the drifts ahead piled up, giving definition to a low ridge. Winter leaped it and sailed a tail-length lower on the other side before landing gracefully. A trickle tickled her hearing. She traced it to a stream flowing through the forest beneath a thin, clear sheet of ice. Bubbles stretched and wiggled under the glass. Winter found open water and nibbled the ice. She spat it out. Drakon carrion. She stamped the edge away and bit it again, letting it melt on her tongue just long enough to reveal the same flavour. She broke her way to a thick ice shelf, the oldest of the three. It too was contaminated. If Radar was to be believed, carcasses close to her destination were cleaned up within days. This one had been frozen into the riverbank all winter. Winter walked downstream, away from wherever the poor Drakon lay.