Somewhere - Sometime
Cold. Emmawynn had never been so cold in her life. Maybe she had not even realized there were so many different kinds of cold. The biting cold of storms when snow and ice whipped against anything that got in its way. The deep dark cold that settled in all the way to the bone and seemed almost impossible to ever eradicate. The calm quiet cold found under a heavy blanket of fresh snow.
Circumstances had changed so much since, well maybe they just had not stopped changing. An exhausted woman pushed her limits, Emmawyn resolutely found a few minutes to take for herself. With a bow and quiver of arrows strapped to her back, a tin of coals in her pocket, and a package in her hands she made her way to a tall rock which provided visibility for a great distance across the snow.
The majestic power of the mountains around her caught her breath. Standing on top of the rock she dragged in a deep breath and spread her arms like a bird about to take flight and she gracefully spun in a circle, then two, then three. A bittersweet smile spread across her features as she took in the vast view, the beauty, the danger, the power. She was getting her wish, she was seeing more of the world. Yet even surrounded by her clan, there was no one to truly share it with. The one she wanted to share it with the most, the one who would have appreciated it, could not be with them. The others all seemed… lost. She had tried so many ways to reach them, sometimes as a group, sometimes individually, but nothing had worked.
After finding a comfortable seat on the rock, Emma slowly unwrapped the package, took off a glove, and carefully turned the pages of her sketchbook to find a clean page. It took her longer than usual to sketch the mountains around her because she frequently had to put her hand in her pocket to warm it up to keep her fingers from becoming too stiff to draw. When she finishes, she carefully wraps the book and drawing coal back up in the scrap of leather that protects them.
In so many ways, it felt like the peril of the mountains around them was a physical representation of what was going on with them. They were on the edge of being torn apart by the circumstances of life, by their own failures. Logic told her that trying again would be futile. If their experiences to this point were not enough to get through to people what it was they had to face, if Ryheric had not been able to communicate it to them, if her previous attempts had not been enough, what good would it really do for her to try again? Yet, something flared in Emmawynn’s heart. Something that defied logic and belonged only to her. So she made her way back into the cave where most of the others were resting where she found Dandy. In the course of the conversation she pointed out to Dandy “Eirik is distracted by his need for revenge, he has forgotten our purpose, why we are here. We all need to remember why we are here.”
