North is where you would go. From what you knew of this region, the majority of people lived south, where the land was much more warm and pleasant compared to the frigid mountains. Not only would you be able to avoid people who might treat your beast form with suspicion, you’d also be able to avoid Riefclaw and his men.
Its not as if you expected to face hostility from them, but knowing their ways they might find some way to rope you into doing some less than savory acts with them.
At first thought going north seemed contradictory to what your aim of finding love was, afterall surely you’d have a better chance of meeting someone where there were more people.
However there was something you had to do first. The curse, although the pendant you were given prevented the curse from spreading to others, that still wasn’t enough. You didn’t want the curse to affect anything, to influence someone into being attracted to you or vice versa. No, you wanted to find a way to counteract the mental effects of the curse, that way you wouldn’t have to worry about it like you had done with Yuriv. You’d know for sure that the love you’d nurture was one you choose.
To do so, you would have to go north. Although they were only stories, as a child you had heard tales of a clan of crafters and soothslayers who held powers over mystic arts. Said to live in a village surrounded by an imposing wall made from unbreakable green ice, and having the power to bestow blessings, they sounded like your best bet.
To that end you would travel north. Travelling in your beast form was easier, and hunting for game was even easier as your claws made swift work of any potential prey.
At first you had gone out of your way to cook the meat in a campfire, yet you found yourself getting more impatient to gorge upon your meal with each kill, and eventually after catching a young deer, you had found yourself already biting into its freshly killed meat before the carcass had even hit the ground. You felt some amount of disgust because of this, but that feeling disappeared as you filled yourself with your meal. It became readily apparent that your new body came not just with newfound strength, but also a set of honed instincts that made life in the wild easy for a fierce beast such as yourself.
Unfortunately you quickly realized how your once fine clothing would not meet such fortune. As you travelled north in earnest, your clothes slowly began to degrade, becoming torn and ragged as the landscape around you steadily went from verdant greens to snowy whites.
You still wanted to keep some sense of decency so you tried to keep the parts of your clothing that covered your privates at least moderately intact.
Your fur became a bit of a mess as well, unsuprisingly despite your attempts to clean yourself whenever possible, travelling through the wild quickly caused your fur to become rough and matted in some places, which annoyed you to no end.
When the last of the green was sapped from the land, and all you could see around you was a frigid landscape of frosted pines and distant mountains, you grumbled as you looked down upon yourself and realized you looked more like some ragged beast than a sapient being.
It wasn’t all bad though. Although you looked and smelled like a feral animal, it just so happened that a feral animal was what you needed to be in this exact environment. At first you would worry that you wouldn’t adapt well to such a cold place, even with your animalistic instincts, yet you found yourself suprisingly at home. Your fur kept the frigid frost from sapping your warmth, and even as the snow began to pile on the ground more and more, your paws found it easy to gain ground.
Even your fur seemed to agree with the land, the grey color camoflauging well within this land of snow and pine.
It took about three weeks before you finally had found traces of the clan you had been searching for. Although physically you were well adapted to this land, and your body almost never seemed to grow tired no matter how much walking you did, you were still a stranger to this land and had gotten lost many times.
It was when you were searching for shelter to rest for the night, after having eaten directly from the carcass of a snow fox that was unlucky enough to cross your path, you had seen something that caught your eye. A small grotto that was built into the side of a hill.
You would have nearly missed it between layers of large pine trees had you not seen the flicker of a strange green torch illuminate the white and blue landscape.
Curious you drew closer towards it.
It was….