Leaders were gone. How strange, no? She had been so sure that they would be there for a long time. But was that the hunger that had come for them? She had told that boy - that Fenyang - that it was coming and then, Halcyon had grown so hungry for adventure that he had left. Was that it? Did she even know? What she did know is that strangers had started prowling by the borders with their hungry paws and so, she had taken off at the rising of the full moon to the south. She had never completely felt the want to leave but for now...she did not know. She felt she did not know anything at all.

She spent some hours wading through the forests and fields before she found the sandy shore that reached out towards the island. The moon had risen to its pinnacle, bright and silver as it illuminated the ripples of the river; winter had begun to encroach on the land and she could see the faint frost by the water's edge where her paws rested. She breathed in deep with the realization that she had never truly faced the winter alone and her mind flashed with images of the rabbit's skull, its leathery skin pulled tight over bone and dirt: would that be her? Maybe she had misread everything.

She tried not to think too long about such a thing and so, in order to distract her mind, she let out the faintest of songs to the moon. Subtly, it called for Halcyon but otherwise, it was but the lingering sound of a question mark hanging over the river.