Liss found a tunnel. And the tunnel must have known she felt homesick, or at least that the heat was melting her with such thick fur grown in. So when she'd emerged — she'd been in snow.

It took little investigation to discover Winterscar lay behind her, though she could smell no Saatsine on the wind. It gave her frown... Aivar was there no longer, gone like a ghost the same as her kin. Yaalk'ali, too, a dream and nothing more.

She went North, then. Farther North than she'd gone before, with no dispersals to chase her off. Liss walked to the very end of the world, where great ice cliffs fell off into the dark and brooding sea. She looked for whales, or an albatross sent from grandfather to guide her home... but none appeared.

Bad dreams followed her, lingering like warnings Liss couldn't make sense of enough to heed.

Until the fire.

She thought she'd imagined it at first. Like the Borealis come down to play, a vibrant lavender spark on virgin snow. It must be what she was meant to find, she reasoned. So she stayed.

As night fell and the cold seeped in enough to be felt through even her thick Northern pelt, she pulled close to the warmth of violet light dancing off the ice.

Over a vast and empty landscape, she sang to the skies and hoped, maybe this time, someone who loved her would answer.