She is alone; it is a frightening revelation for the she-wolf when she awakens from her injury-induced slumber, her surroundings completely unfamiliar. She cannot remember how she got here - cannot remember much at all. Blurs, fleeting images of something that might be memories - or perhaps only dreams - flash in her mind and she gives a low, stifled whine as a bolt of pain threatens to crack her skull. A headache, as if she needed anything else to make the experience more traumatic. Isn’t it enough that she has no idea where she is, or where she came from?

Only brief flashes of faces and names, and at one point a forest but she knows she is in no forest now. She can smell the stifling musky odor of cave air, feel the dampness that thickens her coat and hints at running water nearby. The faint gurgling splash that greets her ears tells her that there is a waterfall somewhere outside of the stone cavern, perhaps even hiding the entrance to it. It is hard to tell from this angle, with a curve blocking her view to the entrance and only a meager light shining around its corner.

She crouches against the far wall, her breathing no more than an erratic pant as she struggles to grasp firmly onto one of the floating images in her head and perhaps make some sort of sense come from it. The effort is futile; they float by like pictures in a river, always just out of reach and taunting her with things she doesn’t know. Things she doesn’t remember at all, though she knows that she should. Perhaps they are important things. Aren’t all memories important? Isn’t it the past that defines who you are?

How can she know who she is if she cannot remember who she was? She can not, and it is this realization that makes her cry out in anguish, a pitiful howl of a broken creature. A flightless bird, her wings bent and twisted.

She jolts to her feet, the howl still fresh on her lips and her head gives another painful protest. She ignores it, puts one padded foot in front of the other with some effort until she stands at the mouth of the cave, her emerald eyes slowly adjusting to the sharp light streaming through the slow-trickling waterfall. The pond that it flows into is shallow and she wades forward into it, her fur thick and heavy as it fills with water, slowing her down though she is in no hurry.

How did she get here? She doesn’t know.

She can’t remember.

The last thing - the only thing - she remembers is falling, falling. A face, leering, with eyes of a golden yellow. Pain, and when she thought that her body would fail and her mind would break, darkness.

And it had. It had broken after all.