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Note: There will be no set posting order for characters in this thread; it may be treated as a free-for-all until the thread concludes on 4/7. You are not required to interact with other characters and may simply post your character's arrival and curiosity to investigate.

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Negative effect: 「respiratory issues, shortness of breath」

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As winter gradually began to fade into a warm, inviting spring…


... the north hadn't seemed to get the memo.


Instead of the emergence of blooming flowers and wet, slushy snow-melt disappearing from the mountains of the region, it appeared for all intents and purposes that winter was just beginning. Grey clouds gathered overhead as a steady shower of snowfall dropped out of the sky and coated the alpines in a fresh layer -


- and simply didn't stop.

You notice something different about it. Unlike normal snow, this has a distinctive scent to it, a faint note of sulfur hanging in the air as you breathe in and quickly stifle a cough. You’ve been out in it for some time, actually, and you realize with a start that it’s been much harder than usual to catch your breath.

The air wasn’t simply thinning as you ascended the Summit - you were used to that sort of thing - but you could barely take a step forward without staggering to wheeze and struggle for air.

You finally make it to the top.

Why were you here?

As if pulled by strings, you had felt an urge to come to this place, and now you stood at its peak and looked around with increasing befuddlement. The snow seemed even stranger now, and as you squint through the falling flakes, you notice it’s not the usual crystalline white - it’s tinted a faint, eerie purple, almost undetectable at first glance.

You see a crevice in the side of the mountain just several feet ahead. It’s large enough for a wolf to crawl through, and a cold wind seems to be blowing out from it.

Where could it be coming from?

Why was she here? The snow was good reason to turn back. There was no prey stupid enough to try to brave the storm. The clouds hung low, thick and the grey bordering on black in the most shadowed parts. And the snow fell in fat flakes and blinding sheets, coating Solulfur's coat and disappearing the evidence of her trail behind her, every pawstep filled in quickly.

But she had to know. She had to see how bad it was. Spring had come, blossoms on the less-effected parts of the mountain bursting from the snow and melt-soaked earth. But here, on this summit, winter's grasp remained. Or was it winter, or summer's Hel?

The stench of rotting eggs, of fire, smoke and ash belched up from the belly of the earth, tinged every flake that stuck to Solulfur's fur, ear and nose. Fire was what she associated with that, and Solulfur had a good memory. She recalled the fires of last year, what a disaster. Their numbers were stronger now, the pack more established, but that meant nothing in the face of the wildfires ravaging the earth. And they had pups, now. Fragile little lives, lights soon be be snuffed by the choking smoke that would sweep ahead of the flames if Solulfur did not confirm the source of the fires. Evacuation was on her mind.

Or, it had been, before the air or maybe the snow or ash or whatever it was had begun to affect her. Now, her only thoughts were shelter and survival. There was a vice locked around the Black Sun's chest. Her head felt strange, a headache muffled by a slightly dizzying lightheadness as she sucked in another wheezing, too-shallow breath. She had not inhaled much of the smoke from the fires last year. This was a new experience, and it was unpleasant.

She wasn't sure whether it was better to try to make it back down the mountain through the snow and treacherous slick spots hidden beneath the blanket of porcelain, or whether she ought to keep hoping to find someplace to catch her breath higher on the summit. In the end, she didn't have a choice. Some foreign motivation gripped her, urged her to keep going.

Solulfur listened to that little voice within, unsure if it was fate's whisper, her grandfather's guidance, or her own flame burning down to the last frayed edges of its wick. She kept walking, picking her way across the terrain slowly to ensure she didn't miss a step and plummet to a bone-shattering death below. Her every breath was laced with a rattling wheeze, her maw parted as she sought to suck as much oxygen from the thin, snow and sulfur-scented air.

She didn't understand what was happening, and there was no one here to witness her. The Sun-wolf's golden gaze was rimmed with a white edge of fear. Homesickness for the Vale and the comfort of those within it was a sickening knife-twist inside her, but she kept climbing up the Summit until the peak stabilizing beneath her paws. Solulfur paused, eyeing the faintly lavender-tinged snow with narrowed eyes. Her flanks heaved, head held low, before the shape of a shadow carved into the cliffside appeared before her. The wind brushed against her, buffeting her almost away from the crevice, but the winds on the high peaks of mountains could be fickle. Solulfur ignored it, setting her teeth into a grimace as she soldiered forward and shouldered her way into the crevice. It was dark, but her keen vision would adjust in a moment. In the meantime, Solulfur tried to scent the air to get a sense for what might lie in wait in the dark. She didn't get much of a breath in, before she crumpled beneath the weight of a rasping coughing fit. She just couldn't get enough air in. Not a single breath she took seemed to fill her lungs fully.

She shut her eyes, waiting for her vision to adjust to see what lay within this windy crevice, hoping to dispel the dizzy spell gripping her with a moment of rest.

Skill: Vagabond [1/5]

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Millie had always been a wanderer, even since the moment she finally found the strength to stand.

But this?
This was different.

She was a wanderer. Not a risk-taker. She didn't like danger, nor mystery, nor situations where she would almost certainly bite off far more than she could chew.

So why was she here, now? She had no idea where this place was. She'd been here for a few days at most, made a single acquaintance out of sheer luck, and now...?

The slope of the mountain smelled putrid. Millie hacked and coughed against the fumes, wrinkling her nose and grimacing. And simply to make matters worse, the further up she traversed, the harder it was to breathe; she took deep gulps of breaths, yet no amount of air would satiate the burning desire for oxygen in her lungs. That, coupled with the foul odor, made her light-headed.

She didn't even think she would make it up the mountain anymore—but she was more than halfway there now. It felt so wrong to turn back now, after all the effort she'd put into scaling the massive ridges.

And, soon enough, she finally—finally made it to the summit. It took her until now to finally realize that the source of the smell all along had been the goddamn snow. Snow that, rather than its usual pristine white, emitted the slightest hue of purple.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a silhouette. Millie squinted before trying to call out—but all she could muster was a wheeze. Heey, she paused to cough. Her eyes narrowed, her throat burning. The wolf seemed to be approaching a hole that, inexplicably, exhaled a frigid gale.

'What the hell?'

She fumbled forward to catch up to the monochrome figure. No more did she attempt to speak, for all that resulted in was a dreafully sore throat—instead, she scowled and dipped her head, praying that mutual understanding would suffice.

[she doesn't know that the world is turning just for her]

skill: [none]

Euphemia no longer questioned the strange workings of this universe. When she desired to traverse the heights of the mountains, she did so – and no longer was she simply confined to the familiar crests of Frostfang. Ever since the voting amongst Dawnbreak, Euphemia felt little reason to stay within the borders and pass long swathes of time amongst her packmates. For the moment, she needed time.

She needed distance.

She followed the pull of her heart towards a spire in the far distance and she began to traverse it, feeling the tautness of her muscles pull her bones in order, and she moved in a mechanical manner up, up, up. Euphemia, who had never been the most athletic of spirits, fell into a very tactical type of meditation. She ceased thinking and solely moved, barely perceiving it when the scent of sulfur entered her nares. Somewhere in her consciousness, she thought that it was similar to what she read in a book once; that geological and volcanic activity was often foreshadowed by an ominous smell of rotten eggs.

She noticed naught about how the snow glowed in a faint purpleness, when all the snow just south of here had already experienced its annual melt. The silvered maiden noticed nothing strange until she reached the summit and stood with two others, gazing into a gaping hole that billowed steam. For a moment, she deeply missed the silver spires of her Vale.

Euphemia stood silent, jaw tense, and passed the two others a glance of quiet acknowledgment ~ so distracted that she was unable to notice her packmate as a packmate ~before looking straight past the girl and into the yawning mouth of that active cave, which seemed filled with activity, movement, and incendiary potential. Her nose stung, yet her mind was brimming with questions. That’s how she was bred to be – always curious, and never satisfied with the depth of her current insight. The bookish northerner decided to learn more about this phenomenon, which had crossed her path once or twice before, but never in this close and interpersonal way. It was as if her every desire, every wish for knowledge might lie within this cavern, if she were only brave enough to traverse it.

Breathing deep, she stepped close, nose held outwards, brandished like an unsheathed sword.

---

skill: scout

Times were changing. The lands were changing again. Something had happened. A balance had been disrupted. Something south, to the east and a dream visitor had beckoned for help, the spirit (or god) weaving a story, their words fluctuating in and out. Pictures of lands in War's mind. Things she did not understand. Then she gasps, as the sight of the Summit is passed before her gaze.

Wardruna didn't want to go - but she must! A call is made to her pack, to announce her coming absence. She does not give time for Sheauga to join her. Wardruna knows her travels would take them far north. A suffering she did not wish the little woman to endure, after pushing herself hard to overcome Northfall's winter.

Wardruna was glad for it, for once she left the captivating Briar she had come to love, snow began to pour. Her mind still racing, a beckoning further to rise the heights of the Summit. Was Valhalla calling her, as it had done for her father? Would she too be swallowed by the mountain?

Each step she took was taking her breath away, literally. She staggered and hacked, the smell of sulfur made her think of the fires that had raged in the south, though she saw no flames! Further and further she claimed the heights. Following the footsteps of her father (and mother) before her.

At the top, she noticed the purple glow of the land, the snow taking odd the shade which blanketed everything in sight. What was happening to their world?

Skill 1/5: Ranger

It was supposed to be spring. Yet here he was, shoulders coated in snow thick enough to bury the sun, climbing toward a mountainious summit like a frostbitten fool.

The wind howled as if angry to find company, slamming against him with every step. Isúlfr bore it with gritted teeth, jaw tight, breath shallow—not from exertion, but something ... else.

He paused midway up the slope and sucked in a breath that never quite reached his lungs. The air was wrong. Thin, yes, but laced with something acrid, something that scratched at the back of his throat. He coughed once, then again harder, a scowl deepening across his features as if the mountain itself had insulted him.

Hadn’t he come here to get away from strange things?

The trees with their rosy blossoms and warped smells hadn’t followed him up the cliffs, but whatever this snow was, it wasn’t natural. It dusted the world in quiet purple, faint enough to question his own senses. He blinked at it, eyes narrowed. A trick of the light, maybe. Or something worse.

He remembered the dream, though he’d tried to shrug it off—the thin figure in the fog, the broken words stitched together by guilt and urgency, the strange flashes of places both known and unknown. It had felt like nothing more than a fevered story, some half-forgotten fable clawing at the back of his mind, until he’d woken with the weight of it still pressing between his eyes. Northwind Summit. The name had lingered long after the rest had frayed.

He had told himself it was nothing, just a frivolous dream.

But he had come. And now he stood near the top, legs stiff from cold and lungs burning, only to find himself staring at a gap in the stone.

A crevice. Unnatural in shape, wide enough to crawl through, dark as a swallowed secret. A wind whistled from its depths—colder than the rest, if that was even possible. It curled around his ankles like a beckoning hand.

Isúlfr stared.

For once, he didn’t curse. Didn’t scoff. His body still ached, his breathing still rasped. But some of the sharpness in his mood had dulled. This was no ordinary mountain, no mere storm. Something was here. Watching. Waiting.

And that meant he’d find out what.

Solulfur opened her eyes to two new companions. By her side was a small woman, looking as though she might be swept away on the gales of forceful, snow-laden wind that coiled around the Summit. The woman wasn't familiar, but she greeted Solulfur with a rasping voice and sour expression. Solulfur could only offer the same expression in return, her breathing rasping through her lungs unpleasantly. On her other side stood a familiar face and pelt, and Solulfur's pounding heart skipped a much-needed beat at the sight of silver and charcoal shades of fur. She opened her maw, a desperate plea on her tongue, before Solulfur's gaze drifted up and realized it wasn't spring's sharp greenery that peered out from the face of the Shakti-Vaes, but a clever autumnal amber. Euphemia, then, not Aurelia.

A lavender snowflake landed on Solulfur's tongue, and she wrinkled her nose at the foul taste before coughing again. She glanced inside the crevice, finding little to see, before peering back outside the gap in the stone. The snow and wind had only slightly eased inside the dim alcove, but Solulfur would take what she could get.

She wanted to go home, but her paws burned with the urge to stay and follow her instinct to investigate, and she knew it was no longer a natural motivation coming from within her. She poked her head outside, to glimpse who else had fallen victim to the strange snow's effects. She could hear their pawsteps crunching in the snow, quiet beneath the moan of the wind.

A dark, tall woman with tan undersides - she reminded Sol of Tiberii in her confident warrior's bearing, but not quite so overconfident in the lift of her chin. And a handsome man, clad in such similar silver to Solulfur she nearly assumed him to be of her bloodline.

She blinked at them dumbly, fighting tooth and nail for a slow inhale that did nothing to abate the sensation of slowly suffocating. Inside. With haste. Perhaps more bodies in the small space would help ease the effects, or maybe one of them was a healer.

Sindri was growing like a weed, and with her expanding mind and honing skills, the need to roam gripped her so hard she felt like it was hard to breathe some days. Memories, disjointed and not always quite understood, stirred up her spirit in ways she didn't fully grasp yet but was beginning to see clearly like pieces of a puzzle being handed to her one by one. It was hard to pretend she wanted to be home all the time, but life had regained some sense of normalcy. The island wasn't quite the same without those they'd lost, but Sindri remained hopeful they were okay, wherever they all were -- even if the stars didn't have them, as she still resolutely voice to anyone who brought it up or looked like they needed cheering. She still wanted to talk to Cupid about it all. Despite being well aware many of her family, of the island itself, were deities given mortal form, Sindri felt... strange, as many budding young girls feel as they grow and learn who they are, what they like, the things they want to accomplish. She loved her family with all her heart, none so dear to her as Cupid himself; her one and only parent as far as she was concerned, her anchor to reality, her love and light and home.
That didn't mean she wanted to waste away on the island, letting her spirit wither in confinement. She could only be the bright ray of moonlight for the family when she was charged and full of life, and to be full of life was to explore, and learn, and soak in all the world had to offer. She promised she'd be back the next day, and that part hadn't been a lie - she thought she would've been home by then. Yes, Cupid had explicitly told her to take someone as an escort, and yes, Sindri had explicitly decided that was not The Move. She'd agreed, nonetheless, and spirited away after parroting her planned night of adventure to her siblings (had they been listening? She wasn't sure.). She wasn't even sure how long ago that'd been -- two nights? Three? More?

Cupid was going to kill her.

But he didn't understand -- she hadn't given him the whole story, and with each step Sin took, she regretted it. Perhaps if he understood her divine mission, he might've come along himself, or might've understood her need to go... but it was the one part she kept to herself. If nobody else was keen to go exploring, well, then, they hadn't gotten the same dreams she had. Not a memory, as she usually saw -- a call.
If they knew, they would've understood. They'd know where she was going, they'd know the urge was too strong to fight, they'd know she had to.
She didn't know if she was allowed to tell those who weren't in on the secret. What if it was her and her alone who had been summoned, and she was endangering her family in spilling the beans? No, she thought it was better to be subtle.

The little girl thought she was so smart.

Thankfully, she was well-prepared. Tyr was a good teacher, and she could take care of herself well enough to catch little critters and hide from things too large to face. She didn't know why Cupid hadn't wanted her out here! When the snow seemed to turn into a storm, the tiny piebald girl pressed on, searching for shelter. Easy peasy! Except... well, she couldn't seem to find anything, not even for her little frame, and the snow tasted funny. Smelled strange, even, and Sindri screwed up her features against the blizzard as she carried carefully on step by step.

For a long time, there was nothing, and then: 'Inside. With haste.' Sindri's ears perked, and she hurried forward towards the sound of the voice with a bark ahead as if calling for someone to hold the door for her. Hopefully... they were understanding of a kid just wanting to get out of this snow! She'd get back to her mission, once she could catch her breath! Right now, the dark pelt of the sun-wolf was blotting through the storm, and Sin was just glad to gallop her way, breaths heaving as she struggled to inhale enough oxygen.

Seer 1/5

He has been here before.

In his dreams, in the waking world.

This was where his grandfather lay, forever buried by the snow and claimed by the mountain that was not their own. His journey further north had originally been one of....finality. One last visit to Ragnar's tomb before he left the northern mountains and tundra for what may be the last time, one last visit with grandfather before leaving the man's pack that no longer welcomed him now that his son was king.

Forsaken, wretched.

But then a man came to him in a dream, called to him, and this trip to the summit had another purpose. Who was this spirit? Oh, godly being, who spoke to him as if he was flesh before him.

The air was familiar, the scent of flames on the snow, sickening, an unnatural wheezing coming from his lungs as he reached the top. It shouldn't be like this, Northfall was of similar height and he'd been born there. Magic, was at play, the gods work.

He had been right.

They were angry.

It was then that he noticed the others, spotting familiar coats among them. Wardruna? Euphemia? He called out, his deep voice echoing on the mountain top as he made his way towards where the others were gathering. A pup too, was here, and the teenager frowned with worry as he kept an eye on the young one. These were dangerous times, and he wasn't keen on anyone joining Ragnar down in a crevasse, let alone a child. hér barn (here child) Vitus called, waiting for her to catch up.

Skill: Seer [1/5]

---

Why was she here? Rúna was finally enjoying the warmth of spring, the herbs that returned after thaw. And yet, she found herself... here. At the top of some mountain, her chest heaving with aching breaths, a bitter, odd-tasting film coating her tongue. Her blue eyes watered against the viscerally blustering wind, her skin whipped raw beneath her coat from its harsh beating against her body.

At least, she wasn't alone—so if she was crazy, she wasn't the only one. A hoarse cough rumbled in her throat as she urged her body forward, squinting against the gales, towards the soft violet glow up ahead. Was Murdoch still nearby...? She was tempted to check, yet she couldn't pry her eyes away from the luminous burrow up ahead. 'Inside. With haste.' Her ears perked forward at the familiar response—ah. She had met that wolf before.

And the other familiar face. Last seen in a boisterous windstorm, much like this one. Standing a few strides away—not far enough away. A bubble of resentment rose in her chest, but she suppressed it. This was the last place that would need an argument.

She cast Sólúlfur a wary glance, her nostrils twitching against the sour-smelling snow. Yet, Rúna didn't need to be told twice. Heart beating in her throat, she ducked her head and slipped into tight space.