Noora shivered. She'd never felt cold like this before. Large men's gloves and fur-lined bindings kept her hands and feet warm, but her tail kept coming unwrapped and she was wearing a cloak made for someone almost two feet shorter. Footsteps stretched away behind her for miles, large round holes in the snow. She'd not seen anyone since leaving Connlaoth, and no wonder; who would want to live here?
Admittedly, it was nice to not be stared at. Folk everywhere were mistrustful of her people, hearing tales of the walking dead. Oh, they were true, but they weren't right. There was no harm in it, not that she could convince anyone else of that. As for the Connlaothians, they seemed to revile all magic as unholy, and of course necromancy was on the top of the list. All she could do was deny ever using it, but that didn't stop the looks. They feared her, or pitied her (she was never sure which), and although they weren't unkind, she knew she wasn't welcome.
She pulled her cloak around her more tightly and stomped onward. She had no idea how much further she would have to go, and she wasn't looking forward to the return trip. A cave near the coast in the north-east was all she had to go on, and even that was someone else's fuzzy memory from over a decade ago. While travelling through Connlaoth, she'd heard of a group of soldiers pursuing a fugitive through the frozen tundra to a cave, and being turned back by the skull of a giant beast. It was staring out at them, huge and blackened with tusks twice the length of a man, they'd said when she insisted. They'd fled, she heard, not wanting to deal with more of them, and certainly not wanting to meet whatever it was that could kill such a creature. To her, it sounded like exactly the sort of thing she was hunting.
A powerful beast from many ages ago that died and turned to stone, she'd take it back to her sister somehow. They were partners of a sort, and she had a job to do. Nothing could stop her, not the hushed whispers of distrustful townspeople and certainly not freezing ice. She wasn't quite sure how she'd get the thing back to civilisation if she ever found it, and even less idea what she'd do for food when her rations ran out, but they were problems to be solved later. Plan too much, she always said, and nothing gets done.