keep your head UP nothing lasts forever

Irin's wanderings had carried her far from the temperate Western expanses that she had first found herself wandering in. She wasn't sure what had drawn her to leave those warm, western lands, but Irin had wandered anyways, always on the lookout for another of those massive pawprints, hoping to find signs of a giant wolf's strides across these lands. But she had found none of them when she reached the vast, frozen expanses of northern Alacritia. The snow and ice were only made worse by the fact that it was now solidly winter. Her average lengthed pelt did little to shield Irin from the bitterly blowing winds and it did even less to insulate her from the thickly fallen snow, which gathered on her body like a blanket and weighed the yearling down as she trudged onwards.



It was by sheer luck that she stumbled across the frozen expanses of the lake. Immediately, her imagination was captured by the strange pillars erupting from the ice, and by the arches that had been created. Almost against her will, she found herself padding onto the ice, blending in easily with her surroundings. White fur against white snow, with only silvery-blue eyes to mark her as anything other than a part of the landscape.



Perhaps if she passed through one of these arches, she would find her gaze settling on another land; one of warmth and perpetual summer, the polar opposite of these always frozen expanses. Perhaps if she could climb one of those pillars, she could climb and climb until she reached the realms of the sky, the place where all wolves went when they died. They place that surely she would go, one day, joining the multitudes of other wolves who had left the world behind and watching the world below in the form of a twinkling star. The possibilities out here were absolutely endless.



And then she realized what was going on beneath her paws. The ice was lighting up, leaving a path behind Irin with each careful step, feeling to see if the ice would shift beneath her. They glowed and gleamed, illuminating the world around her. Irin stopped dead in her tracks, turning to face the shore as she examined this strange, glowing phenomenon. Maybe it was because this ice was imbued with something otherworldly. Maybe here, she was closer to the realm of the spirits, or to that realm of perpetual summer that had to be straight through one of these arches.



This place really was beautiful, despite the bitter winds and below freezing temperatures.


"speech"