Since arriving to their new home, Taima had been left to her own devices, required to patrol and scent-mark wherever Mapplethorpe and Naira had left their tracks in the snow. Truth be told, it had irked her; her mentor and teacher had discarded her like some old dug-up hare, abandoned her just like Datura had. The lack of social interaction had left a bad taste in her mouth and the longer she and Mapplethorpe went without talking, the more she had begun to resent him and the lessons he had taught her. With no one as her keeper and no one to keep her company, the young Lyall was just beyond the newly marked borders, resting with her back against the trunk of a gnarled tree and looking as though she were waiting for someone in the distance before her.

Truth be told, she had started thinking of her family... of those she had left behind... and just how much she had changed since she had been swept away from her beloved Cedarwood Forest. In the silence of the trees and whispering of the snowfall, she found a sort of comfort that numbed her to the bone, making her long for nothing else other than her home alongside the banks of Jasper Rocks. The snow landed in her fur, perched atop her ear tips and rested on her shoulders, but she didn't care... She was much too engrossed in the world in her head, the world in which everything she saw in her mind's eye was familiar and absolutely perfect.

A puff of air came up from her parted lips when she thought of her mother, remembering just the right hues of gold and blue that made up her mismatched eyes and the pristine arctic white that made up her fur. Taima sniffled when her fellow pack mate, Hollowheart Keep's other yearling, had broken through the trees. She didn't even try to keep the disdain from the mask-like marking on her face when she turned to fully look him over. She addressed him just like she was taught... her words too mature, too terse on her year-old tongue, "If Mapplethorpe sent you, tell him I decline whatever request he has asked of me."