there were azaleas where your face should be

It happened so slowly that she barely noticed it.

Small things, at first. Blips in her memory. Walking into a classroom and forgetting why she'd needed to enter the room at all. Stopping while collecting herbs, lost in thought, until she left in the middle of the task and wandered back towards her den. The devil of it all was that she didn't recall these lapses at all. Even in the worst of it, when she lost hours of time, she'd come to (sometimes hours away from pack lands), and quickly make her way back as if it was the most normal thing in the world. She made excuses - yes, she was working hard. Perhaps she was dozing off while standing. At first no one noticed. They were spread thin as it was, teachers spending more time with students than with other faculty. It was easy to fall beneath the radar.

Until it wasn't.

Until she woke up, as if from a deep slumber, standing stomach-deep in a snow drift, so far north that her spit seemed to freeze whenever she opened her mouth. Theory had turned slowly in a circle, wading in the snow, wondering why, why, why am I here - then where am I - and then who am I - and finally, as if transported by a deity, she woke up in her den to Corvus shaking her awake. Her paw pads were bleeding. Her nose was frost bitten. Where were you? What is going on? Please, just tell me... A part of her ear was dead and black, but she couldn't see it. Didn't feel it. She opened her mouth to say something, anything -

And she must have said something. But now she was here. And Corvus - Corvus? That shy, older wolf, assigned her mentor... she hoped she'd impressed him - was nowhere to be found.

Theory was deep in the thicket now, days (or months? Time had become an ephemeral thing, impossible to keep track of) later. The thicket both real and metaphorical. Even as she shouldered through the thorns, she felt herself fighting her own mind. Why had she gone this way? Wasn't there somewhere she needed to be? There was someone she had to meet... she'd sent Alouette ahead, right? Theory looked warily towards the empty sky, a dismal light grey. The sun was either not up yet or hidden somewhere behind thick cloud cover. Alouette was nowhere to be found.

Alouette's wings, battered by hail, had given out when she'd followed Theory into the north. The raven, entombed in ice, would not be discovered until the snow melted in the late summer.

She was so used to the shuffle of wings nearby that it felt eerily quiet. Every step deeper into the brambles cut her, but she felt far enough removed from her body that it barely registered. Her ribs were visible easily now, her fur matted and dull. There was something she had to do... somewhere she had to be...