The last few days had been bitter cold. Well, if Navi was being perfectly honest with herself, things seemed to be getting warmer by the day, but…it was still damn cold. Much as the young girl was loath to admit it, her mother was—had been—far better at finding suitable shelter for escaping the weather, and Navi very much felt the need to escape the weather. She was cold and damp and cold and hungry, but everywhere she had plopped her little rump since she and her mother had parted ways seemed equally cold and damp, and there hadn’t been much to eat on the barren road to Moladion.

But Navi was almost there—or, at the very least, she thought she was. It’s not like she had any scent or grand landmarks she could remember, just what her mother had described to her a few times and some general directional guidelines, but…by all accounts of which she was aware, she should have been there by now. Hell, she could be. She had caught the scent of wolves a few times, but, in the absence of the gigantic evergreen trees her mother had described to her, Navi had sort of been bouncing side to side between the scents she caught along her path in an attempt to avoid unnecessary encounters with wolves she really didn’t care to meet in the first place. Not that she was overwhelmingly ecstatic to meet the wolves she was supposed to be meeting, mind you. Things had always been simple: her and her mother, her mother and her. No, this was more…obligation. It was important to her mother that she was introduced to her “extended family”, and that meant it had to be important to her—didn’t mean she had to understand or want it.

Still, there was a nagging presence in the back of her mind selling out on what-ifs. What if she had taken a wrong turn? What if there was a different pack there now? Her mother had always been so confident on where they were going and what awaited them there, like those things were carved in stone and no power on Earth could rewrite it, but… Navi, despite all her similarities, was not her mother, and she had no memories or knowledge of this place to manifest some sort of blind faith. The only thing she could tell herself was that, if her mother, a wolf of nothing but pure logic and reason and reality, could believe these things, there must have been a damn good reason for it. Damn good.

That didn’t solve the other what-ifs, though. Like, what if she froze to death before she got anywhere? Or what if she got there without her mother, and nobody recognized or believed her, and she was turned away? What then? What if…

Navi’s inner monologue halted its laments. Through the dancing white caste of snow on the tundra, the girl squinted her deep crimson gaze, just able to make out the ragged edge of treetops over the next rise. Picking up her pace from a labored trudge through the thick covering of fresh snow over the ice to an equally labored and awkward lope, the dark girl cut a swath through the thick white blanket as she rounded the top of the steep hill. A strong gale of wind greeted her, its icy whip tossing her black coat, biting straight through the silver undercoat as it ruffled her uncomfortably, but the girl simply squeezed her eyes shut against the assault, ears pinning back and head retracting in annoyance.

The wind died down with the briefest of pause, but, in that scant moment, Navi squinted out to the far horizon only to find it edged by a forest. From her distance, the girl could not speak for the particular size of the trees, but they were every bit as evergreen as anything her mother had spoken of for sure. The wind battered against her small body again, this time bringing with it a heavy spattering of snow that hit her like a wall, so forceful that the girl stumbled back a few steps and nearly lost her footing back down the hillside. Navi pushed back, face scrunching with effort as she fought to place one small paw in front of the other, a determination taking her over. She knew, at the very least, Taviora or not, that forest was far better than an open tundra, especially with what she expected was the threat of a blizzard icing the air.

With stiff resolve, the girl started her way down the far side of the hill, all but blindly forging her way toward that glimpse of trees. The wind only picked up the further she walked, and so the girl, in her stubborn determination, gritted her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut, her paws refusing to halt their march. The mad howl of the wind was enough to render her deaf, and so she continued with no sense but of touch, and even that was numbing with the piercing cold.

In time, however, she made it, and she knew it by the sudden buffer against the wind. Despite the resounding scream on the air and the ever-persistent cold, she found herself no longer under assault, or, rather, relatively so. The wind that ruffled her coat did so with a far gentler touch, and, with a forceful sneeze to clear her senses, Navi opened her eyes to find herself face to face with the broad trunk of a pine, surrounded on every side by her rear by trees of like stature. The girl took in a deep breath through her nose, but all she received was empty, cold air. Even the scent of the forest—what should have been deep and earthy and clean—was horribly muted by the storm, all thoughts of borders and boundaries lost under several inches of white.

Navi let out her breath in a huff, standing for the moment in dull motionlessness. Her small body still teetered dangerously, her mind not quite registering the lack of blows now that she was out of the open. But, then, her mind was quickly…slipping. She was cold and damp and cold and hungry and…tired.

With an unceremonious fwump into the virgin snow, the girl’s dark form crumpled at the base of the tree, no particular thought given to the arrangements of her limbs. She had simply ceased to stand, and her waning thoughts were too sluggish, too far gone, to care.