Glorall had begun to warm; slowly, the ice that lapped at the shoreline some mornings had thinned, and the birds had tentatively begun to return to the crevices and outcrops by the shoreline; the trees, too, had begun to shake free from the snow, their budding leaves poking through the grey, gnarled bark. The nights no longer brought snow but rather, it left the grass wet with dew as it began to emerge from beneath the layers of white. Green had begun to peek through the landscape and with it, the snow had begun to melt in the northern reaches of Moladion.

He had first noticed it one morning when he had taken to the river to fetch fish; the water crept higher as he stood atop the same boulder he did each day. It lapped at his undersides, cold and vicious; with it, sticks had followed. The next morning, he had sighted a twisted hare - it had been frozen once it seemed, its fur half missing and its flesh blackened and yet, now it had escaped into the great sea beyond. He had watched it with great curiosity, his eyes trailing up the river and to the west. Spring brought about more change than he initially thought, it seemed.

His curiosity had always been an all consuming thing. It bit at him like fleas; it kept him awake like the cold and it made him restless like the heat. He could not shake it and so, he obeyed with little hesitation. As the sun rose, he too rose in the west. On quiet steps, he graced the rocks of the grotto, their sloping sides dark with water. Weeds peeked out from the crevices formed between boulder and earth. He could see that some of the lower levels still had the faintest bit of snow resting upon the stone, desperate to keep its place as the sun crept out from the shadows of night. But it wasn't any of that. None of that had made him curious but rather, the thundering of water beneath the earth. From the dark maw of the crags, the melt off had begun to seep down and form waterfalls, Moladion seemingly intent to feed the water back into itself. The river had grown fat, spilling out over the crags and into the darkness below. It seemed to roar and he was too rapt to look away.

The sun cast deep, long shadows across the crags; he moved among them, his nails scraping down the enbankment as he moved into the crevice. His paws hit the ground below, its surface slick with water that made him scramble momentarily before he regained his composure. Still, he remained as passive as ever; his eyes merely fixated on the darkness ahead, his head tilted slightly in curiosity as he sniffed the air. From below, there was more than just water and dirt - rot, old meat, foul grass. The unwanted remnants of winter and the fall before. All of it clustered in the earth below, a terrible pit of waste. He was curious and yet, he had grown curious too as to whether any other would be drawn in by the sound, the smell and the mere thought of where winter truly went when it disappeared.