He was silent at the base of the tree, watching her with inscrutable eyes as she spoke her denouements. When she turned to gather her clothes, she felt a gust of wind, and he was gone.<br/><br/>She took the the long woodland road back to town, alone and yet all the while feeling as if she were being watched. The feeling faded when she reached the gates of the village. Twilight was a lightening bruise on a strawberry and the stars were its seeds.<br/><br/>Nightfall found Dove restless in sleep, in dreams of heated touches and smoldering kisses and fierce yellow eyes. At one point, she awoke to find those eyes staring at her from the window, perhaps terrifying until she realized it was not but a stray cat who had come to chase mice. It leapt down from the window when she saw it, and vanished into the night.<br/><br/>The next day Ivory made her way to the outpost to find a suitable guide from the number of scavengers and rangers that tended to gather there throughout the day. The outpost was at the far end of town. It had a stage for mounting horses and coaches and was a constant source of traffic, day and night, because it connected to a major road leading to Rock River, port towns and ships that could take one far from this place and at quite a pace...<br/><br/>But her goal was only to find a guide, one who could take her not to the river, but to any of the locations where her research had led her to believe there might be ruins: two to the north a good thirty miles, near the ruins of a temple to some old and forgotten god, and another not fifteen miles to the east, in the deep forests, where a village was said to have been consumed by the very forest in centuries past.<br/><br/>All the while, she felt oddly about her surroundings. An unlikely chicken fluttered and flapped and skittered along in her shadow until she actually noticed it. Clucking, it leapt away, flapping its wings. Later, another curious sight: that cat from before, balanced on a log-swing, being pushed by a pair of giggling children.<br/>