Cetseni wakes, and it is not where she'd rested her head the night before. Mother, siblings, the saatsine, they'd all gone, vanished as if they'd never been there in the first place. Small hawk rises to shake the dirt from her fur and surveys the land that surrounds her, jagged rock and high slopes, the girl uses the vantage to look out over the valleys below.

And yet she cannot see the sea. She wonders now if she'd been killed and buried in the ground, her soul forsaken to walk with land spirits, lanzadoii spirits, sharadoii spirits. Not muradoii. Her first thought is one that rejects this notion, and she brings the pad of her paw to sharp rock with urgency, slicing a line across. The sting, the warm flow of sanguinous fluid dripping from her paw and dotting the stone beneath; it told her all that she needed to know.

Cetseni was not forsaken yet. A glimmer of relief would light up scarlet eyes, she saw this now for what it was; a trial, a proving. She accepts that her mother must have brought her here in the night and left her to find the way back, because glum as it might've been, it truly was the only explanation that made any sense to her. Cetseni knew that she was but flesh, easily rended, easily replaced; and she'd seen how close the dreadqueen had gotten to the Sun chief. Mother shed no tears when she tore the life from Pipaksriruk and condemned her to rot, and so Cetseni knew that it would be no different for her. Nor Yakone. Nor Tso'kun.

One good thing about travelling among the lanzadoii, despite the odd stench of them, was that they'd prepared her legs for such a journey. She orients herself and searches for any sign of her mother's bloodscent, but the area is barren, and she hasn't even the slightest idea of where to start. Instead, she searches for the taste of salt on the breeze, so that it might've brought her to the sea, if she could get there, she could make an offering of blood and flesh and call upon her muradoii foremothers to guide her, bless her. She would bleed many in their name.

She looked to the sky and the dark, shifting clouds moving overhead, a storm brewing within, confirmed as rain began to fall. Be it far from her to admit, but she worried for her siblings, if they too had been given this trial. She knew she shouldn't have, the words of Sivaak bleed through; a doctrine played a thousand times in her mind with the hopes that at one point it might've freed her of the shackles of love.


This was the way of the muradoii. Cetseni begins her march to the end of land.