homemade mountains

freezing fog, 3F - early afternoon | for @Hocus

His investigations around Stonewatch Timbers had been mostly sparse. There were plenty of trees and rocks; it was a forest. But he had found little to break up the monotony of the trees. That wasn't to say that he was bored, quite the opposite, but he longed for a chance of scenery without having to go too far from home. It was by complete accident that Branwen stumbled upon Bowed Maple Bend. He'd spotted the tree from afar before realizing that a small section of river separated him from it. It would have made him happy if the river had not been frozen. He had few qualms with leaping into frozen cold water. But it was quite frozen, thick enough that he could easily walk across its surface.

Reaching the other side, he leaned against the barren Maple tree, lifting his head just so, that his crown rested flatly against the trunk. His eyes gazed upwards towards the sky, which he could hardly see from the fog. Was that sky or was it fog? What a game. A few stray flakes landed on his nostrils. His head snapped down as he sneezed, shaking his head violently. A shiver ran down his spine and he shifted his rump against the crusting snow. Watching the immobile surface of the water, he wondered how hard it might be to break it. In his current condition, he didn't have much faith that he'd do any damage to it. He slid to his belly and slowly crawled to the water's edge. One leg reached forward to let a paw rest against the surface and he let his eyes flutter closed.

His foray into the northern lands had been a mistake. Every impression left behind him in the snow that brought him farther from Grizzly Hollow chided him, and as his eyes roved up and down the tumbled, barren land he knew that this place held no answers for him. It was in the south that Piety had lived, it seemed unnatural that she would have come quite so far to escape whatever terrors had ruined her. But possibly. And it was this possibility that urged him to carry on until he saw another face, a face with which he could converse and come to the conclusions he had already made in his heart once and for all. His sighs were like morning fog, though much hotter. But even the fire of the Lord in his heart he could not melt the sheet of ice that had stilled itself on these waters.

A shape much darker than the snow moved in the peripherals of his vision. Turning his regal, snowy head the man realized that there was some skinny looking wolf slithering onto the ice. Hocus snorted. The river would have been frozen for months now, given how cold it had been recently. That thing could not have weighed more than a fawn. Boldly, the man walked out onto the ice. He remembered playing on the frozen marsh as a child. "You," he called out to the scrawny wolf, "What do you know about these lands?" His voice was soft, yet it seemed to boom with reverent vibrato of a priest.