Penumbra

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This lore is . . . pretty old. I couldn't say how old, but old by my standards. I'm not sure whether or not I'll ever do anything with it, but if I do, it won't go in the same direction I had planned for it back then.

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one

She was walking. The soft snow here was easily disturbed by the trampling of her claws, but she much preferred the quiet sounds it made when she took a step to the loud crunching of brittle, icy snow.

Almost nothing except for the ground she was marching on and the sky were visible. This area was remarkably barren. Above her, it was dark, a deep purple-blue. Plenty of stars were out with the lack of other light sources, but she couldn't see the moon anywhere. On the other talon, what would have been bright white below her during the day was, instead, a murky silver-gray that a dragon not accustomed to the night would have had a painfully hard time seeing in. Luckily for her, she wasn't that dragon.

She had no reason to be here, but she had nowhere else to go, so she saw no point in heading away. She could have flown, but she'd rather be on foot tonight, and flying took more energy from her. She walked more than she flew.

Her left front talons suddenly felt more cold, as if she had just placed them on a chunk of solid ice as opposed to the mellow sheet below her. She lifted them off the ground and turned them over to look at them. A few specks of what looked like dying ashes glowed on the bottom of her paw, despite the fact that it was wet, and the light struggled to keep itself from dimming. It had a noticeably yellow tinge to it rather than being a typical orange. Small streams of black smoke began to rise from it. She bent her neck to examine her seemingly burning paw for a minute, unsure of what to make of it, before she decided to just move on.

She wasn't normally chilly; she was mostly used to this kind of weather by now. That was why her claws had been so easy to notice. Her fur was also thicker than that of many Skydancers.

She kept going for a while, her mind blank and thoughtless without objective. It was then that something emerged out of her predictable surroundings--she'd actually found something.

It was a cave. The stone was plain gray; nothing spectacular. However, anything in the middle of a place like this made her curious.

She stared at the cave for a moment before going in with no hesitation. Her talons clicked on the floors, the noise echoing out into whatever was waiting ahead. Although it looked darker the further down it went, there seemed to always, somehow, be a path of dull white light through the middle of the tunnels, even though it had nowhere to be coming from.

She continued aimlessly in the hopes that she'd find more in the cave than just rock. She failed to meet this goal. There was nothing more in here than there was out there, and she must've been searching for hours . . .

What she had done was tire herself well, and so the best thing she could do was rest.

She forced herself a little longer before she gave in and stopped, deciding she would sleep there. She turned her attention to the wall for a few seconds and saw that there was something, but not something that would help her that much.

A sentence was (very poorly) scratched into the stone in large letters, all of them almost entirely illegible; whoever had carved them clearly hadn't been the best with their claws. From the looks of it, they'd also been worn down over time, and she couldn't even see some of the lines. All she could fully make out was the first word of the sentence, you.

It would probably do her better to investigate after she had more energy again, when it was easier for her to focus.

So she lay down in front of the wall and closed her eyes.