1/31/2025, 4:45 AM
Sabast watched his own exhale form into a cloud on the air, inhaling deep lungfuls of the frigid alpine air before dropping his jaw and sighing a fresh plume of fog, once and then twice. No one else was with him at the moment, and a childish wonder at the bizarre landscape he was lost in had briefly taken hold of him.
How strange it all was. He'd never seen so much snow in his life.
He tilted his weight on his paws, feeling the snow crunch and melted ice trickle against the pad of his paw, sending a shiver down the man's spine. Nope, never mind. Sabast snapped his jaw shut, a vicious sneer slithering across his expression as if to make up for the brief second of simply existing. This place was awful, even worse than the southern sector of the land he'd already traversed.
But Kemet would not reunite itself, and determining just how high the water was over their figurative heads was important. So Sabast scouted, never far from Seti's side - such was unthinkable, really, but this was a place of the unthinkable.
He was about to trudge further in a mostly random direction, eyeing the snow before him for any sign of pitfalls he was not skilled enough to notice even if there were any, when a gods-awful sound rose high above the evergreens walling Sabast in from all sides.
Pine. What a foul stink.
And Mekh, because who else could that wretchedly distinct coywolf call come from? Sabast scowled, sincerely weighing turning around and walking back to the Kemet group's current camp.
He didn't. He was loyal, if he was nothing else. Kemet was his duty. The Pharoah was his loyalty. What was Sabast outside of it?
Nothing, he knew already.
The guard was unfamiliar with navigating snow, but he was lightfooted and agile even so, picking his way toward the call with slight awkwardness here and there. When closer, Sabast sent up a series of short, quick barks - I heard you, I'm here, where are you?
The more of them that he could gather, the more protected and strong the Pharoah and his family were. That had to be Sabast's priority right now.