Time passes like an afterthought, and before they know it, Ferelden has survived another winter. Its people — earthy, rugged, and strong — gnash their teeth against the cold and say ENOUGH.
It is time for spring.
The land hears them and obliges.
Buds, dew-drenched and supple, poke through the lingering snow drifts. Grass overtakes swaths of land, green paint dripped on a blank canvas. Dawn stretches her rosy fingers across the horizon. She tickles the birds awake. They answer in earnest.
Hopping from branch to branch — wings fluttering, talons clicking, heads tilting — they sing:
I'M HERE ! I'M HERE !
Others, stirred by the song, peek their heads from their nests and offer rejoinder:
AS AM I ! AS AM I !
This is as it always is. This is as it always will be. Winter bows out to Spring; the birds, as birds have always done, announce it to the woods. Scene change! Clear the set! Bring in the ensemble!
Bring in the rabbits with their twitching noses. Bring in the deer with their bright, black eyes. Bring in the bears, honey drunk and groggy. Bring in the foxes, quick and sly. Bring in the bees! The butterflies! The spiders! Bring in them all!
I'M HERE ! I'M HERE !
AS AM I ! AS AM I !
The forest speaks in the way that all things speak. In repetition. In mimicry. It speaks through the birds and the rabbits and the deer. Through the bears and the foxes and the bumbling bees. It speaks in the leaves rustled by a puff of wayward air. In the drip of melting snow. In the sound of a deer feeding on supple buds.
And when it stops?
Not all warning bells ring.
The forest speaks, and then it doesn't. Surana, cautious, but curious, keeps her eyes on the deer in front of her. She watches the eyes — shiny, black, unblinking. She watches the mouth — frozen mid-bite, foliage dangling against its chin. She watches its body — the way its heart and lungs make puppetry of its hide. Rise and fall. Rise and fall. Her own heart aches to match the rhythm.
Predator.
Danger.
—————— RUN.
And yet, somewhere buried beneath the fur and the fangs and the camouflage she has bundled around her elven bones, Surana knows this is a threat she can handle. She knows the kind of creatures that own a gait like this gait. She knows the kind of lungs that breathe these breaths. Lumbering through the forest like a guest unannounced, only man (or dwarf or qunari) can quiet the spring choir.
Surana — cautious, curious, wolf — waits with the deer for the final unveiling. And in the moment, in the deafening silence, they are one and the same.