✧ Déracinée ✦ A Vérité SRP

Instructions

⇷—————————☾—————————⇸ The night had not been anything out of the ordinary. She had gone to the river. Had visited her garden. The wind curled around her long fur with force, pulling her along the path instead of dancing past, but the sky had been clear. She could see the light of the stars, twinkling down at her with their silvery gazes sharp and bright. She wondered what they saw when they looked at her. But as always, she moved on. She had been still for so long that she didn’t truly know how to move anymore. The paths her paws followed were worn into her without thought now. River. Garden. Den. The same quiet circle, traced so many times it no longer felt like a choice. At the stream she stood in the shallows until the cold climbed into her legs… wrapping her in its numbing embrace. A small part of her wanted to break the cycle. To find out the answers to the questions she sometimes whispered to the night sky. Some nights, she looked up at the stars, and wondered if Valeur was looking at the same ones. Some nights, she stood in the stream and wondered if Altesse was somewhere nearby, fishing too. Vérité buried those parts of herself… those foolish questions… with the seeds of her flowers. They were the parts of her that had been wrong. The parts of her that had driven everyone else away. She had the wind. She had the feeling of the stream and the flowers in her garden. It would be enough. It was no longer a choice. Vérité stepped out of the stream, and her pawsteps started to draw her home. It was a challenge. When she finally turned toward home, the forest felt different. The wind had grown sharp and restless, rushing between the trees in hard, uneven bursts. Branches creaked overhead. Damp earth shifted beneath her paws. The wind howled, clawing at her fur as if to draw her away. Somewhere in the dark, something cracked loudly enough to make her ears pin back. She paused, staring into the shadows, but nothing followed. After a moment, she walked on. Her tail brushed against the twigs that had begun to fall around her. Even so, she kept walking, her pawsteps firm against the thin warmth of the dirt below her feet. The trees thinned around her as she walked, the familiar scent of the clearing she had always come back to at the end of the night filling her nose. It was mixed with other scents now, the scent of the wind. Of freshly overturned earth. She didn’t think much of it. After all, Vérité's small world had changed over the moons, but it had always had her constants. The clearing came into view. And Vérité's world froze. A great tree lay across the place where her den had stood. Its trunk crushed the hollow flat beneath its weight, roots ripped from the ground and clawing helplessly at the stars. Moss hung in ragged clumps from broken soil. The grass had been shredded, its blades brushing past her tail as the wind continued its efforts to pull her away. She had been born in the den. It had been the last place she’d seen Tristesse. Where she had seen Charme. Where she had seen Valeur. She hadn’t realized how much she had kept in this den until it was gone. Vérité took an unsteady step back, her tail brushing the ground, ears pressing tightly against her skull. The clearing was wrong. Everything stood where it should, and yet nothing was where it belonged. The stream still murmured in the distance. The wind still whistled through the leaves. The stars still watched from above. But the one place she had returned to, night after night, was gone as though it had never existed at all. For one wild heartbeat, she wanted to run to it. To dig through bark and splintered roots and earth until she found something left behind. Moss from her nest. Her scent in the hollow. Proof that it had been real. But Vérité had been still for too long. So she only stood there, trembling beneath the stars, while the wind carried pieces of her home into the dark. And then, with silent paws, she left. Her roots had been torn away just as cruelly as the tree’s. Now she was alone in a world that suddenly seemed too vast and far too stifling. She did not know where she could go, or who she was without the comfort she had carved from this place. Who was Vérité, beyond the cycles and comforts she had built around herself? The mottled loner did not know. But it seemed the world intended to make her learn. And that scared her more than anything had in moons. ⇷—————————☾—————————⇸ Vérité, I am so sorry. But also you would spend the rest of your life in that den and miserable, so unfortunately it is necessary. Doesn't stop me from feeling bad about it though. Also someone should please rp with me, girlypop's entire character growth is through SRPs atp.