The lines of her were bright and crisp against the overwhelming blankness of the landscape, heavy cold and white up to her ankles staining the blush of her skin the fierce color of Winter, her presence in the forest, tentative and unbidden, like a warm and delicate breath to melt away the stillness. She reached out past the raw skeletons of trees and the shells of once-green things in her wake like a wraith over foam and spray, careful, but lacking in such a creature's inherent elegance; often she would bend and stoop to better see a breadcrumb-trail of tiny paw prints pressed just so into the frost, or lift her gentle lips to an arch of branches above to disturb its precarious burden of snow, precious crystalline stardust, because she found that she liked how it felt in her mane and slipping down her back like satin. Her tail hung low and dragged behind her like the tatters of a makeshift veil, knots of earth and twigs caught in her horns like laurels, but she really didn't seem to notice, and with so much wildness on her she would have appeared to those spying eyes patient enough to witness her elaborate traversal of the wood as a nymph in her own domain.

The patterns in the fallen leaves whispered promising things, and so she was not afraid.

She contemplated the horizon, her skull raised high and bouncing like a sparrow's despite an ache that pooled and purpled at the the base of it; she had spent the night curled in an old hollow to take shelter from a storm, biting and angry, and though she savored the close taste of cherry oak and nature's things and the great romanticism of it all, Gaia's accommodations were greatly lacking in leg room. Though bruised and battered by the hardships of travel she so easily resumed her childlike excitability in the sheen of day, casting back the ghosts and the thoughts that might've hurt another so that they hid behind the hummingbird sounds in her chest, soft and bubbling as she drifted. Her intentions were sure and humble, searching and exploring the face of a fickle green planet for more nomads, more monks and priestesses and healers and storytellers, teachers to teach her anything and everything and for no reason she could consciously discern, and so she searched and explored and stretched, unfurling into the land so that it in turn bled into her—a quiet plea to learn it secrets.

She took notice of a weight on the air as she walked that danced and fluttered along the sleepy edge of her senses, intangible lightning across her flesh as if a storm raged unseen someplace between two kindred worlds, and the child was reminded of the mighty thunder god with his hammer in the clouds, and more fondly of her father and the stories he told of old and powerful magic, of watery seams in sunlight where no structure stood, and suddenly she realized, and her sprightly dryad's legs were still. It was an entryway, she guessed — she knew (and unconsciously she gasped aloud); a door that wasn't a door, unlocked but safeguarded, and she smiled, a wide, silly thing, at finding such a treasure amongst humble hillocks and sleeping boughs. She ran forward unceremoniously, twisting between frothy columns of sunlight that tore into the shadows of the earth as if touching something warm and real would turn the dream to ash, and her wayfarer's spirit was charged with purpose.

She hummed a sweet prayer for safe passage into this, another unknown, paying particular attention to those patrons of the homeless and those of motherhood, divine protection, and hoped that the others wouldn't mind such unequal adulation given the circumstances. Some deities were undoubtedly too jealous to be taken seriously, she decided while secretly loving them more.