How many times had she walked by the mouth of his cave and deluded herself into thinking it was just because the best mushrooms happened to grow in that same area?
Too many, she knew.
Even the bear had worn a trail nearby through the undergrowth and marked a few of the trees with her claws as warning that this cave and the land surrounding it was under her protection. The bear even considered it a prime hunting ground though she kept her kills far enough from the cave for them not to be discovered much.
Keeper told herself it wasn’t stalking - she’d made a promise to come visit him on the nights when the moon was never quite at its fullest and brightest so it couldn’t hurt his eyes. But a few of the times she’d come and called softly to him, she’d received no answer and the morning light had driven her off lest she be discovered lurking by the other he’d mentioned that live deep within. She could never cite the source of her disappointment as she walked away, just that it was there and he wasn’t.
There was one thing that Keeper knew and believed: she couldn’t stay away. She kept returning as many nights as she could. Rain, sleet, and snow could not stop her. Extreme heat that made her swelter beneath the trees could not dissuade her to turn back from where few breezes dared blow. She just kept coming, even on a night like this when the chill enters her bones sharp enough to make them ache and the bear rumbles sleepily in her breast longing for hibernation.
She could have approached the cave-mouth as the bear but she chose to shift her shape at the last moment. The bear’s thick fur tolerated the chilly air better than Keeper’s did, so she shivered in the aftermath of the change. It still seemed eerie here because even though she knew the cave was in use and occupied even when her blue friend wasn’t there, the scents of Balto and his cave-companion did not fill the air for her to sniff them out. That was another reason she shivered as much as she was momentarily spent too from the shape-shift.
But there she was: the pony-sized dunskin mare that had come hunting mushrooms in the moonlight and now came to hunt him out because she missed him. This time she was bold and braver than before as she poked her muzzle and only her muzzle through the hanging curtain of vines and creepers to murmur his name into the cavern air - “Balto?”
ooc: posting from my phone so excuse typos and lack of html. <333