Flames of Power

Valdís would have preferred the sweltering silence of the ancient shrine to the hissing rumbles of this rank land.  She scowled, pale paws picking her way through the darkness, nose recoiling at the stench of brimstone but her stomach fluttering with excitement masked below her disdain.  She had never been in a territory like this.  The closest would have been the Dysmal Canyon in the north but that was a place of eerie quiet, not full of stirring sounds and scents that made it seem as if she'd stepped into some still dying carcass of earth.

Peering down a crack in the earth she paused, a slender paw reaching out to knock a small stone into it, ears flicking forward, quivering as she waited for the sound of stone hitting stone only to be greeted with a hiss of steam.  She stumbled back, fur on end.  Whoa!  Cool!  She was about to knock another stone into the vent when she felt a stirring in her gut, a flicker of intuition that told her she should not be making such a stir.  Right, best to keep moving.  She didn't want to wake the dead or whatever ill-begotten beasts slept here.

Valdís moved like a wraith, a ghost in her own right, pale and lovely and silent.  She slipped over the rough terrain, around the cracks and edges, her body moving like water across it when the stab of intuition caused her to freeze.  She was not alone, she could sense it.  Carefully she pressed her body against a boulder, peeking around to see a large, dark male muttering something at the ground.  He seemed off to her and so she hesitated.  Uncertain if she should say anything or stay put but her thoughts drifted back to the shrine and she took a deep breath.  She was young but she was fierce, trained early in battle and war, the arts that left her now homeless. "Are you summoning spirits?  That's kind of dangerous out here don't you think?"