The temperatures in Tephra have been more bearable without the sun, but she has seen the toll the darkness has taken on her home and her sisters, too. The four of them thrive in their respective seasons but there has been so little change without any clear difference in the days.

But she makes her annual pilgrimage to the common lands anyway. Perhaps in the hopes that something might be different there. She has lived such a sheltered life, so safely removed from the world at large, insulated in the humid world of Tephra. She has heard rumors of the monsters wreaking havoc on Beqanna, but she has not seen them. So she strikes out on her own before any of her sisters can try to talk her out of it.

She goes because she has to. Because she fears, in the marrow of her bones, that if she does not find winter she will die. She knows that it must be winter someplace, even if no snow falls from the sky. She can feel that the seasons must have changed in some way. Under normal circumstances, the temperatures would have plunged below freezing and her breath would form a cloud around her head. She would be giddy with relief. All would be right again.

Alas, there is no snow as she emerges beside the river. The temperatures are colder here than they were when she’d left Tephra but this is only a small consolation. She casts a weary glance around at the wilted vegetation before she dips her head to drink, keeping an ear cocked toward the forest at her back. She had not encountered any monsters lurking in the darkness on her way here, but that does not mean that there are not any lurking in the periphery, waiting to strike.