"I can't go on living like this, like a mole in a burrow!" - Erik
Imagine not an opera house, but a craggy cliff of boulder jutting, a singularity, from the tall grass of a wide meadow. No noisy rumbled of carriage on cobbled streets, only the violin hum of crickets in this orchestra pit. City rats there are none, only a lone mouse combing through the grass for the errant wind-blown seed.
She made sure to stay in the dark, stone shadows, ever wary of the raptors that haunted the bright skies. Mouse shivered for a moment in an alcove, fluffing her fur against the chill of deep autumn. She rattled the bag slung around her neck and shoulder, calculating its weight against the signs of winters length. A mouse alone beneath a tonnage of stone did not need much.
There would have been no mouse-y presence that winter if, in the next moment when she slipped around the boulder's edge toward home, the long winged raptor had not been otherwise engaged. Instinct bred deep into her unconscious moved Mouse's legs before she even had a thought of escape and she was deep under a narrow protrusion hunkering in the cold mud. She could still the bird of prey from her hiding place and that the large bird was worrying at a crevasse low on the stone wall.
With a short, sharp beak and talons made for pouncing and piercing, the raptor was no match for the depth of the dark, little space it's quarry had secreted itself. Mouse saw blood on its talons which spoke to the bird's frustration at losing its prey and the determination to get the morsel back. But with the sun sinking low and the time drawing near when larger hunters would be about, the kestrel gave up and went looking for an easier meal.
Mouse dared not move from her own safe shelter until the whir of normal insect noise told her the avian was well away. She fought the sucking mud that gripped her hands and feet, her fur heavy with the gunky clay-dirt that dried to a hard plaster. A long night of grooming lay ahead of her.
But first, there was the creature in the secreted in the cleft.
If left alone, it would draw carrion hunters and all the sorts of undesirables that followed such. Her oasis would be over-run and she would have to deal with many unwanted visitors.
Mouse easily climbed the short way to the dark crack in the stone and slipped inside. The setting sun and depth of the space made visibility impossible, but the sickly smell of blood was guide enough. There was also the dense aroma of deep earth, an oddity for something that had sought the security of unyielding stone. She reached forward to with a seeking hand and her tiny heart nearly stopped when a grip that was nothing but claws wrapped around her wrist.
