till death do us part

"Speech"

It was hard to bite back the urge to seek the darker, more shadowy parts of the territory. He knew, he knew that the light of the day had never dissipated the shade of his mother. She had existed in the sweltering heats of a desert, the translucent white of her coat iridescent and otherworldly, shimmering like the heat that rose from the sands beneath his feet. He could only cast fugitive glances at the toes of her feet. Any more blatant attempts to see her and she would vanish before him like mist.

That was a different world to the rocky territory he stood upon now where sheer drops appeared around every bend, and movement meant climbing, jumping, or crawling over rocky obstacles. There where dark caves that travelled deep into the unknown, and a treacherous path that lead upwards, spiraling into the tip of white that marked the top of the mountain. This was different again from the woods him and his mother had travelled through in the last weeks before her fall. It expanded his knowledge of the world, the realization that there was so much more beyond than whatever simple territory you stood in.

The silent boy fought his urge to sink deeper into the mountain, conquering it by climbing upwards instead. His breath was heavy as he took the climb, scaling upwards, paws scouring into muddy rock as he pulled himself up a ledge twice his height. Paws coiling beneath him as he jumped a ledge, all in the name of journeying ever higher. He didn’t stop, even as his pads wore thin by rough rock, and his body had connected roughly to more than one obstacle as he threw himself around recklessly. He didn’t still until the texture beneath his paws turned to snow, and he shivered at its cool touch. Here was something else new, and his paws sunk into its depths, adding another difficulty to his journey. Panting, wordless, he continued.

He was weary now, his vision swam and his body ached. The air seemed thinner and his breaths where more ragged, drawing in that much needed oxygen into the depths of his lungs. he took another step forward, faltered, and lay against the snow. in the past, the more abused and battered he felt, the more tired and hopeless, vision scrambled, mind asunder, she had always found him. Her ghost did not come to him now. She was gone, lost to the wind. She had left him all alone.