Like a cloud-shadow over earth, the wanderer was drawn over the landscape by cyclical forces, pulled by his very nature, compelled…Moving in bursts, resting little, he surveyed his kingdom, from plains to jungle to plains, jutting rocks to mark the keystone of his territory a hundred miles north, a massive upturned tree, its roots clawing the air, marking his territory another fifty miles west. He moved into lands unfamiliar to him, pulled by a dream and a scent of power, a scent familiar and yet unknown, with implications stronger and more crucial than the flow of time.<br/><br/>As he came to villages, he skirted their borders, never entering for he was not one of them, not a thing for society. His kingdom was the plains, the earth, and the jungle; the land below and the sky above. Rooftops and plank floors were strange things to him, and unlike caves. Caves he understood. What he saw when he looked at civilized housing was more like prison cells. Still, he let the people keep their peace so long as they let him have his. And sometimes he was seen.<br/><br/>“There goes the shadow wanderer,” some would say, having heard tales from neighboring villages. Like those villages they would leave out fresh bread or fish for him, or even gifts of clothing. Of these he sometimes partook, particularly of the food-gifts, but of the clothes, he left those behind, for it was his intention to move quickly, to keep the scent of the one he’d first sensed “a good three weeks ago,” when he’d felt a power move across the land and settle in the villages just outside his border. Birdsongs out of those places carried harried, excited tunes, as if the birds knew some huge exciting secret…and the scent of that power was at once frightening and intoxicating, increasing in potency the closer he came to its source.<br/><br/>He loped onward, through jungle and plain, darting across a raging river by flitting over jutting rocks in its surface like a living ghost. And soon he found her, where jungles gave way to forest, and the air cooled, and the river’s roar was a distant memory. Here there was a smaller river; to him a stream. It was no doubt connected to the river he'd crossed, but gentle, shallow, small—and beside it, the target of his search, the source of that Essence-scent, lying beneath a tree. A woman.<br/><br/>Her first sign of his coming was a puma-shriek in the middle distance, so abrupt and sudden she must’ve dreamt it. Surely she was too far northeast, too close to human settlement for such a predatory cat to have closed in on her. But still, the sound was unmistakable. Where it came from, she could not see.<br/><br/>But he could see her from his hiding place in the thick bushes that gathered like skirts around trees across the river. He had planned to step out and introduce himself until the moment he saw her, and a bolt of recognition/heat/hunger ripped through his head/heart/loins at once and set his chest triphammering. What had he expected here? Another Lunar? A spirit? Certainly not a city girl in a cotton dress, drying her hair by the riverside...Her perfect, jet black hair, so like his own...<br/>