Ekaterina. She had black, ulotrichous hair, and red-splashed lime eyes; she had tanned skin and high cheekbones. She moved as though she were boneless and ran as though someone was chasing her. Which if course they always were.
At first she had yellow eyes, full of delight and sunny expectancy for the future, and as a toddler she would reconnoitre freely in and around her home. As a slightly older youth she began to negotiate her wider surroundings, the lush forest, the domineering river, and the clay-ridden cliffs.
One night at the raw age of five, Cat, as she was dubbed, was living up to her title, clawing her way up an imposing tree's none too adhesive trunk. She favoured this tree above all others she had yet beheld as close to midway up there was a suitably-sized hollow, lined with bouncy mosses and apparently unoccupied. Cat curled up inside, feeling protected, watching inquisitively as beings around her made ready for the light to abate. She loved the smell of the forest, earthy and sweet like honey, and she longed to belong as she watched as indistinct figures clambered and flapped to their nests, or burrowed to their lodgings, helping along their distractible young. Even the flowers had gradually closed up, and so at first it took Cat by no surprise as the first tree began to sink, and then another and another, until several were completely vanished.
Ah, she thought, everything hides from the unknown, but not me, I am a venturous girl, and she giggled. Her joy quickly turned to embarrassment as she heard a faint slithering sound, and her tree began to lower itself into the ground, and she recalled that in actual fact she and the trees together were supposed to be bold and unafraid. Cat was swiftly terrified at the prospect of her tree sinking without trace, as her searching had not yet lead her underground, and while she was unafraid of the dark in a place she was familiar with, somewhere even her people didn't seem to go willingly was not a place she wanted to be. She was in fact petrified, her body immovable, and so she inevitably allowed the forest's floor to swallow her within her supposed safe place.