WITH SOMBER THOUGHT

She revels in this place. In the shadow of the crumbling towers in the background, a bleak contrast to the blissful greenery surrounding her. The winds here are warm, unseasonable, and her thick fur is hot against the sun beating against her back like some vigorous drum. She aches to return north, to escape this province of fire and seek the chill of the snow—but she is enraptured in all this beauty, the ice forged of winter long leaving her yearning for the blissful taste of spring. Here, it is different, as if it were petrified and kept in this form forever; fields of bright blue and gold tickled her paws with each careful step, making sure to avoid each delicate flower as not to crush it under-paw, to disturb the serenity of this hollow. She is alone, and upon the wind is nothing but the scent of leaves and promises of summer, the harshness of the continent long left behind at the beach she crossed to get here. How achingly beautiful, she thinks, golden gaze flittering about the meadow, this is just like a dream. Perhaps it was. Perhaps Jendayi would awaken, and find herself shivering in her makeshift den during a thick snowstorm, once more listening to the terrifying crumbling of the mountain as another avalanche unfurled its alabaster doom down the mountainside. She bites her tongue—and she does not wake. This is real.

The flower atop her crest is old and withered from the journey, and so Jendayi carefully places it upon the ground, before quickly snipping the bud of another one, just as golden as the one before it, and places it where the other once lay. It was her last lingering connection to the matriarch she had left behind, the one final surrender she’d given herself to the past she’d suppressed and long forgotten. There is a daintiness about her that usually is not there, some girlish and youthful giddiness that is no longer shackled to the bleak winter, no longer quelled by the idea that others may be here, watching. She loses herself, if only for this single moment—to roll in the grass and laugh as young girls always do, to tumble in the flowers and send their petals spiraling into the sky to dance with the wind. The smell of fruits and berries soon mixed, and Jendayi soon grew blissfully enveloped within them—until finally, she stops, and lays on her back among the shrubs, staring at the endlessly blue sky and hoping, pleading that it never ended, that the sky would be unfaltering as it always was, and that the sun would fight the dusk for as long as it could.