Submission (#1711) Approved

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Sterling shivered despite the thick woolen layers that cocooned his lithe frame. He blinked away snowflakes that rested on his lashes as he trudged his way through shin-deep snow, numb paws sinking into the powdery surface with a satisfying crunch.

“Why do I do this to myself every year?” he grumbled into his scarf, silhouette lonesome along the crest of a sloping valley he had been following since earlier that morning. The sun had arced closer to its zenith, his shadow stark below him, making the ice shimmer like glitter. With a wistful gaze, he reminisced about the warmed spiced cider and hearty stew he had indulged in within the safe subterranean confines of Newhaven. A small part of him wondered if he could forgo the whole ordeal, to simply turn around and reunite once again with the welcoming hearth of last night’s inn.

Like a goose following its instincts, Sterling would migrate from north to south as winter encroached on the upper hemispheres. It was an arduous undertaking, but one he enjoyed, finding work along the way as a traveling jeweler and accredited overseer of matrimonial ceremonies. Unless such business demanded his presence, the cold was something he avoided at all costs—with one exception. Rather than hitch a ride on a lazard and cross the expanse of humid forests and into the warmer arid lands to the east, it was the rare few times his trajectory followed the path of winter cold-fronts, veering away from warmer peninsulas and plunging into snow drifts with hiked shoulders and a grimace.

A giant red sequoia slanted at a severe angle along the path ahead of him. Its colossal trunk had splintered near its base, an ancient rusting relic from the war jutting out from its broken side like an ugly moss-mottled splinter. By some miracle, the tree had survived, and its remnants had since split into multiple impressive branches that reached up from its original trunk like teeth of a giant comb. Sterling sighed in quiet relief, pausing a moment to catch his breath as he looked over the familiar landmark. Beyond it, coniferous trees sprouted, full-grown yet sapling-like when compared to the sequoia, its smattering of deep green eventually leading to the keb’s intended destination.

Predicting the Torodon migration was somewhat of an art. Perhaps to humans, it would be impossible, but as nature-attuned as Kebanzu were, there was an almost subconscious tug as the boulder-like creatures slowly began to stir, bringing in the year’s first flurries. News traveled fast at the first signs of their waning hibernation, and though there was certainly a vague time-frame for their migration every year, it had been less than a week since Sterling had caught wind of the annual event. He’d paused over a freshly-formed ring with a bewildered blink at his client, who had shared the news with him in his borrowed garden shed-turned-workshop.

“Already?” he’d balked. The year had flown by, and though older, he laughed with his company that he felt none the wiser. After another day, he had finished the pair of rings, and he handed them carefully to their new owner, wishing them the greatest of blessings for the beginning of a new life together. With that, he’d bounded along his northward journey, just as many others of his kind did.

Sterling let his paw graze the sequoia as he passed it, craning his neck to peer at the lofty heights of its unusually-shaped canopy. It was always a breathtaking sight, humbling with the way it dwarfed all other things in the area. Though not in the migration path, Sterling guessed even the snow-capped withers of the Torodons would barely make a sixth of the way up along the fallen trunk. He wondered in passing whether the tree was perhaps even older than Torodons themselves, as mysterious as they were.

Within another hour of hiking, Sterling looked upon the expansive flatlands of the Hibernation Plateau. He’d passed small pockets of kebanzu along the way, the crowd growing denser the closer he got. Now, he could see the small parties gathered a respectable distance from the monumental herd of beasts. With the way one or two of them still lay dormant, nearly indistinguishable from the snowy hills around them, he guessed it would be at least another day or two before they truly began to move along their migration path. Not that he particularly minded the slight wait—with a hub nearby, it simply meant he could cozy up for a day or two before having to brave the cold again, and that was perfectly fine by him.