3/3/2025, 9:39 PM
The sun shone high overhead, but Solulfur felt low.
Hollow. Everything Sol had promised to shield, to cultivate - gone. Everything she'd been promised to inherit - from her people to her power to the world itself - gone. She didn't know if she'd really expected the Isblod to realistically stay atop the mountain, with how many of them had been disappeared to this strange new world, and their dwindling numbers and morale even before Solulfur had been taken. Some part of her had known they'd dispersed already.
But she'd been born to this birthright, and to see and smell and feel her homecoming robbed from her was...devastating.
But Solulfur fra Nordri knew she had not been able to come home, truly, since she'd left to kill a man. Even that first attempt had felt hollow. She'd come back changed, and she'd come back to a changed place. It wasn't the home she'd left and she wasn't the girl who'd gone, either. She'd been trying to get back home since that day.
But finding Nottin hadn't fixed it. Asking her Afi for guidance hadn't fixed her. Finding Hades and learning some portion of the truth hadn't let her come home.
Climbing up familiar pathways to her birthplace felt different, because even her paws didn't fit the same - a little bigger, her body more matured, and Solulfur didn't belong inside these nonexistent borders. Once, even coming close to their inner edge had felt pointless for she wanted nothing to do with anything outside of what was hers.
Now, Solulfur could only grieve what she'd lost of herself, of her past, and think with increasing worry about how she was going to get back. To where she belonged. A part of her wanted to plod into the cavern before her, for Solulfur knew the path to her little alcove in the stone tunnels she had claimed for herself blind, even now. But she knew she wouldn't find rest, there, with only the scent of stone and snowmelt surrounding her; only her own breathing echoing in the loneliest chorus off the walls.
Footfalls made the Sun-wolf's ear twist behind her, before the rest of her mist-clad shape moved to turn and face the approaching wolf.
You do not have to do this alone, said the universe, it seemed.
A sigh of relief punched out of Solulfur's chest, sudden and unexpected. There was a shed tear staining her right cheek, but a mild and tired smile graced her features.
Aurelia....How did you get here?
