You awaken on a briskly-cold but brightly sunny day on a rocky slope. The vegetation is sparse and the wind is biting, but the air is invigoratingly fresh. If you are a native Totoma, you recognize this as the foothills of your homeland. A strange, smooth-sided tower of black stone rises in the distance. Native Totoma may or may not recognize it as a landmark.When she wakes, it is cold, colder than it has been since her naming dream. She gets up and looks around, finds the landscape unfamiliar, yet all too familiar at the same time. With a sick feeling of longing entering her limbs, she begins to move, running because that is all she knows. She tries the ignore the sound of her hooves hitting the rocks though the sound thunders in her ears. She wants the feeling of soft-strong paws pressing against the hard rocks, pounding in a way altogether different than it is now. She alternates between sorrow and rage at the sound of her hooves, at the horns on her head and the spines on her back.
This is her home, this far off place that she has not seen since her dreams. It is a place of rock, frost and snow, hard ground and dry, biting winds rather than the sound, mud of the Swamp and the still, muggy air. When she runs and throws her head back she can almost imagine herself surrounded by her pack, her family as there tails thump against each other's sides and their ragged panting fills the air with lingering, hanging clouds of their breath. When she runs here in this strange place that must be a dream, she is almost happy. She is almost home, except she knows that this is impossible.
It is so close to everything she wanted and yet so far away. She is damned by the scales on her shoulders and face, by horns, hooves, and spines. She is so close to being right, that it is that much more wrong because when she slows phantom paws disappear and are once again hooves that send her reeling in disgust at her own body. When she thinks too long about it, all she can feel is the desperate need to tear this false skin apart. It is a curse to dream of this place so far away and perfect and pollute it with her broken body. Her breath catches in her throat at the strength of her emotion so that when she throws her head back, she can only let out a strangled howl.
There is silence, then she imagines she can hear a response. She wants it to be even though the setting has the essence of being completely empty except for her. That was the ay of dreams, isolating her from her family and her true form, leaving her alone in the horrid, ugly landscape of a creature not quite kin and completely wolf. She was that creature, a wolf stuck unfairly and cruelly in the wrong body. She let out another howl, this one clear and mournful, trying to find the rightness that came with running with a pack, the rightness that comes with being a wolf, the rightness that only finds her in those rare dreams hat take her back to the days when she did not know she had not been given the correct body.
Please, Mother Moon, she pleads quietly as she stares up into the sky, please.
If she could be given this beautiful land, why could they not give her the body to match?
Though a sob and a scream are caught in her throat, she does neither as she stands there, trying to memorize the feeling of cold.