A fight like this one between the two peaks the world is built around must be incredibly intense. It'd have to be, right? What with all of the earth shaking and the dimming of the starry sky going on, not to mention the super muscle demons. Gosh. That's what makes it the stuff of legends and not, say, a tea party. Although really if somebody like the Scales of Meaning showed up at your tea party that'd be pretty...

Well. Anyway. The point is, a clash of titans is a very distracting sort of affair. Or at least, it has to be if somebody like Yue can run away from it so easily. Or at all. It takes her several moments to even pull herself together enough to try standing, and when she finally manages it she's not exactly moving like a champion athlete. But they don't notice when she rises, just like they don't notice when she plops back down onto her scrawny little butt. They might notice Kat's frightened yipping, but since that's been more or less constant since Princess Yin arrived on the scene nobody pays much attention to it even when it switches from the frightened yipping of 'scary people are here and I don't want to be eaten or squished' to the even frighteneder yipping of 'I am being betrayed by my best friend and stuffed into a bag, oh woe, woe is I, the lovely Katherine Isabella Fluffybiscuits!'

If ever there were a time for Yue to drop her sword, this would be it. For as hard as she scrambles about, one hand just isn't enough to gather up her camp site and hold onto her bag and reassure a frightened fox and reassure a possibly even more frightened wolf-who's-meant-to-be-a-beautiful-maiden(?) [i]and[/i] fish a spare change of clothes out of the same bag she's trying to hold and stuff everything dear in her life back into. She flinches after she squeaks, but the monsters are too busy to care that her spare dress is in the dirt now or that a handful of her precious glass beads have rolled over on top of it, and in any case Hyra has resorted to biting and dragging the bag with her because a certain silly girl just isn't figuring out that there's more important parts of running away than keeping all your stuff with you.

But even as she yelps with protest and almost falls flat on her face several times within the first twenty or so paces, she clutches that useless, heavy wooden sword like her life depends on it. And that's really the final word on everything, isn't it? If she can do that now, even now, when she's darting off into the night clutching a fox-laden bag to her chest because it's the only way to preserve what's left of her modesty while little bits of her her now wispy and useless dress float away forever behind her, then she's good enough to keep hold of it through anything, at least until she gets permission to put it down again. She owes Hyra so much more than this.

It's important to run far and run fast, but Yue can't help but slow enough to turn and watch the fight as she goes. And part of it is born of fear, that she might be followed, but that would only merit a fleeting glance. More of it is that, as scary as it is, this new contest is even more thrilling, even more worth a song than watching Hyra had been. Forget for a moment that it's happening to decide who gets to kidnap her and the question of [i]why[/i] any of this is even happening, how often does anybody at all get to see an out and out Princess fighting? And for all that Princess Yin is wicked and cruel, maybe even unforgivably so, it's also true that she's beautiful. That when she moves, her body is poetry. That she wields magic so easily and elegantly that Yue has to wonder if she spent years just holding glyphs in her hands until she could weave them through the air as natural as breathing. And the romantic part of her heart knows it's a shame to run and leave all that behind her.

But finally, she hits the spot where the flash of a diamond bow and slashes from a katana so powerful that where it passes it cuts scars into the earth and the great gleaming horns of the Scales of Meaning, all of it gets swallowed by the horizon and the treeline. Soon enough, even the sounds of the battle and the chanting of the shadows fades into the quiet of softly running water and the last chirps of evening birdsong and the first tentative howls of nighttime predators, and Yue has nothing to distract her from how much her legs and lungs are burning, of how every slap of her feet on the hard packed earth hurts her all the way to her hips, of the screaming rush of blood inside her body that tells her exactly how terrified she is. Or, for that matter, how chilly the night air is on her much-too-bare skin. When she shivers, she can't tell if it's from nerves or the cold. Oh gosh. Oh no. She can't run into town like this! And they know where she lives! And her good dress is... oh no! How is she ever, [i]when[/i] is she ever... oh gosh gosh gosh gosh!

It's all she can do amidst her jumbled thoughts and feelings to lift her feet high enough to avoid the rocks and roots so she can keep pace with the wolf running in front of her. Even transformed like this, Hyra is still the most beautiful thing in the world. For a wolf, she's a little on the small side, it's almost hard to believe her real body is as tall as it is. But her fur is soft and lustrous and the same brilliant silver as her hair. The way she runs is every bit as smooth and graceful as she was back inside Yue's house, and her body is so lithe and perfect that if a hunter saw her pass they'd just as soon drop their bow to the ground as shoot at something so lovely. 

The wolf is so deeply Hyra that Yue almost expects her to turn and flash those piercing red eyes and twist her muzzle up into a smirk. But she knows better than anyone that she's deluding herself, because Yue knows the language of beasts. You can't really have [i]conversations[/i] with animals, leastways not satisfying ones. Not with most of them, anyway. But they can tell you plenty if you've got ears and eyes to listen, and Hyra is crying with every step. She bounds bravely forward, only stopping long enough to let Yue catch up again, but she can't hide the truth. However born for the shape of a wolf she might be, have been, it isn't the shape of her heart. Who, or what she longs to be. And she knows just the same as Yue that they're running, running, running away from the only person either of them knows who can change her back. Oh, stupid, stupid Yue! Why didn't you stay? Surely there was... was [i]something[/i] you could have done! She can't think of what that could possibly be, but even so! She! She..!

She gasps.

Hyra isn't running anymore. Yue comes to an awkward halt just before she would have gone tumbling next to the cliff in front of her. She stands there a moment, and gently lets her still-whimpering bag drop to its natural resting place by her hip (who does she have to be modest for right now, anyway?). And she gasps, because she's never seen anything so beautiful in all her life. 

The world stretches out in front of her forever, lit by stars and moonlight and lanterns floating through the rivers and a hundred tiny glows from animals making their rounds. It's huge. It's so impossibly huge it swallows the Terraced Lake with ease, and that the biggest thing she ever really knew existed. The rocks plunge beneath her and the mountains rise up and dip down and back up again in an endless seeming dance and every inch of them seems painted with the canopy of a hundred-hundred-hundred different trees in their soft night colors. 

And all of it is so much, and so pure that there's no choice that there's no choice but for Yue to start crying. She sobs loudly, hiccoughing and sniffling with every ounce of her heart for the sake of a whole lifetime's worth of feelings she hasn't quite known to feel, and for the million-million steps unfolding in front of her. For every wonder she's seen today. For every new one she's allowed in this moment to imagine. For Hyra of the wolves, panting determinedly beside her. And for, somehow even now, for the old life she no longer knows the way to get back to. 

She cries, and she cries, and she brushes her hair from her eyes as the wind tugs fiercely at it, and she cries some more. Her heart is swelling so full she thinks it'll have to burst soon, and the feeling inside of her is so pure she knows without asking anybody that it could only be love. She tries to speak but only winds up sobbing louder, and somehow that spins her all the way around to sniffly giggling. 

And she dares. She dares brightly and boldly enough to reach out her hand and gently run her fingers through Hyra's perfect silver fur. To put her hand on the wolf's head and leave it there, the closest thing that she can do to taking her hand and just... holding it. Because in this moment, everything must be possible. Her grip tightens on her sword, as heavy as it is. Yes, everything must be possible. Possible enough that even a useless village girl like her should be allowed to promise she'll find a way to fix this.