it's a mystery to me

we have a greed with which we have agreed. you think you have to want more than you need; until you have it all you won't be free. and when you think more than you want, your thoughts begin to bleed.

It is barely morning when she awakens. The woods are just beginning to take shape in the thin dawn light; trees are starting to become sharper and more refined, the snowbanks have a pale gray hue to them, and she is able to pick out the winding path of a winter fox’s tracks in the fresh snow. Wishbone had spent the night tucked into a protective bundle of spruce trees, and she puffs out a breath of contemplation at leaving the warmth.

She decides to wait, letting her mind stretch from its drowsiness, and finally steps out when the morning light turns from gray to rose. Thankfully, there is little wind slicing through the forest and she finds it’s not much colder outside the trees. Wishbone’s more recent years in the common lands (and Tephra, before it was swallowed by the ocean) have made her soft in the face of winters. She thinks back on her time in Nerine, where she was forced to endure harsh, rugged winters straight from the endless humidity of her volcanic home. She had adapted easily then, and Wishbone thinks she could adapt again if the chance arose.

Yet both her homes — windy cliffs and humid jungle — are sunken beneath waves, and she has no fish-like abilities to find a path there. So she wanders the woods instead, stretching her long purple legs into a pace that warms her muscles easily.