komorebi

  

sunshine,
     i want to bathe in your light.

  

      

Even as the dawn ushered in the warm glow of the rising sun, that great orb’s light had barely the strength yet to filter through the tight knit canopy of the pineland. The soft chatter of stirring animals welcomed the weary traveler as she tread with fleeting paws through the familiar weald. So many moons had passed beneath her gaze but none were as beautiful as its last faded imprint she spied between the towering pines of her own heartland. She released a sigh of a held breath she had even realized to be there, feeling a well of emotion swell deep like a rising tide in the chasm of her heart. Born and raised in the highlands, she still found it sad that the thunderous tremors of war, the heavy weight of loss and the last pieces of her family was all she had left with her when she was forced to flee two years ago. It was still what she carried with her, in the here and the now, though it was only her family she had left behind now. But perhaps, just maybe… she could find comfort now in the sweet perfume of sap and in the protection of the wood she had long missed. Even so, as the daughter of the lost clan Balmain had finally returned back to where she started, she knows she’ll forced forever to dance with her own ghosts now that she was back.

A wry smile, still despite the heavy weight of her own torn heart, crept along the leathery edge of her lips as a particular set of ruins beckoned her between the sentinel firs. Pale legs dusted in cinnamon hasten as the fire-hearted highlander sprints through the underbrush like a spirit engulfed in flame and soot. Nostalgia fills her to the core at the memory of simpler days of romping in the safety of the forest with her brothers or training with their esteemed father or even searching for herbs with her mother in these very ruins. Meandering with ease through the crumbling stone with the scattered coins of sunlight kissing the foxlike curves of her upturned face, Catriona knows she is home. She had been long uprooted from where she was meant to be and now that she discovered it all again, Cat wouldn’t be forced away ever again. It was there, wrapped in a thickly woven cloak of false security and resolve, that she committed herself wholly to her cause and for that of her highlander brethren.

But what to do with herself in the mean time? A thicket of the last of the season’s thimbleberries catches the attention of those warm eyes of honey whiskey and a clever thought careens through her mind: Mead. Born to know the family business from working fermented berries and enhancing the flavours, this is what would introduce her back into society at the very least. And the rest? Why it was all up to her, of course. With a bent brow she focuses on foraging, carefully shaking the brambles free from the rubied fruit and patiently nosing them into neat piles. So focused was she that she was careless to the dangers of the land that had been torn asunder by rebellion and greed -- unaware, for now, that she may be watched or trespassing.       

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