"They're gone," she said to the darkness and the darkness responded: gone, gone, gone. The voice echoed back at her and she swore she heard a laughter behind it, the trickling of water just right to find humor in her loneliness. Her ears peeled back, delicate white petals on a growing face - eyes wide and dull, nose dry and cracked, as were the pads of her paws. She reeked of loneliness, of solitude and unknowing. She reeked of somebody left behind. "Will they come back?" Her voice rang out once more into the abyss below, and for a moment, she considered the possibility of no reply and yet, it echoed back all the same: come back, come back, come back. Inflected as a question. A question she could not answer.

She had not meant to be here, not entirely at least. She had meant to stay in the woods, or the fields, where Solstice had showed her fun and friendship and yet, her paws had become hungry and they sought fresh land. The snow had confused her, a haze unfamiliar to her as she stumbled between flat land and forest, her voice weary and harsh from crying out for anything or anybody. At one point, she had even called for her father though his face had become a ghost to her. She thought she had seen her mother in the snow: she was surrounded by her, white and pure, and yet it was cold. Her mother had never been cold.

So, she had drifted. Eventually, she had found herself in the familiar darkness of the caverns below. In the winter, they remained warm for her. Empty but warm. It was there that she had befriended the shadows and the darkness that crept forever into the bowels of the earth. They had not kept her stomach satiated and yet, they had at least given her a voice to hear. At night, they chimed and giggled and during the day, they coughed and answered her call. They were not friends in a way that Solstice was but they were...something at least.

Now, spring had passed. Summer had begun to pave its way even in the world below; light shone through more brightly now, illuminating the paths and bringing life into the darkness. She had followed it out further and further each day until she had begun to find mice and quails, her starved belly filled with them in no time; they distended her awkwardly, her sickness more and more prevalent the healthier she grew. Her fur had began to thicken once more, its patchiness reserved for her nape and tail. She had survived. She had made it. Yet, what was a life without something more? Food and water... it bored her. She craved more and more. She couldn't feel satisfied no matter how many times the shadows spoke back.

"Maybe I'll leave! She shouted into the abyss and it cried back: leave! leave! leave! She took a step back, her ears flattened once more in offense as she huffed and snorted, displeased at their apparent goading. It was with that huff and snort that she turned her back on the shadows and began her slow ascent into the sunlight above. It'd take her time, perhaps, yet she wanted now to join the land of the living once more.