Once again a queen, Winter has a budding army and plenty to offer them to keep them loyal. Besides expanding her territory, she is using her forces to chase specific creatures for reasons nobody knows. None of them seem to be connected.
The changes...
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In the end, Taz and Firebrand determined that the treacherous forest ahead would be best taken at a straight run. Taz ran laps while the Leslander left to find water.
She returned making a face. "I swear squirrels pee in there."
"Tree hollow?"
She nodded, then turned to the south. "You ready?"
"Ready if you are."
Taz's hunters must not have hung around, because the two were well into the pale forest before the threat began to build again. Something in the forest began to match their pace. Taz's footstep-sense was keener; he tried to get some sense of the creature's size, but its weight and stride length weren't matching up. Maybe it could half-glide. It paralleled their path for several heartbeats, then disappeared.
Moments later, a second pawstep-sense appeared. The hunters materialized from everywhere, watching, following. Several times Taz could have sworn he saw motion out the corner of his eye, but there was never anything there when he looked. The Coppertails were just a hundred tail-lengths from the forest's end when a pack showed up. Suddenly, there were flickers of motion on hilltops or ducking behind trees, scooting across dips, diving behind rises, settling into and vanishing against the forest floor, in plain view and yet somehow invisible. There was a leaf twitch ahead. They were almost surrounded.
"Follow me!" hissed Taz.
Heedless of his injuries, he broke into a sprint. Firebrand yelped. In a flash they were weaving between hills and leaping obstacles, Taz trading short distance for unpredictability and speed. The forest's end was ahead. With a final burst the two Coppertails plunged down a hill and leaped the stream at its bottom. Darkwood swallowed them into shadow as the soil type changed. The hunters stopped abruptly.
Firebrand collapsed on the ground, her tail twitching furiously. She was probably swearing. When she had recovered enough breath to speak, she glared at Taz. "Don't ever do that again. I nearly broke a leg."
"Hey, it got us out of there, didn't it? Would you rather have fought them?"
Firebrand scowled at the pale forest.
"I wonder why they stopped," said Taz.
"Probably camouflage. Let's get out of here."
By evening, the Darkwood was starting to thin. By nightfall the next day, they had left the scale-needles behind.
