Dakota stood, restless, and paced to the mouth of her mountain cave. So much had changed. Things could never go back to the way they had been. Smoke was still thick in her mind, obscuring the awful memory.

Though she was far away, and though she was alive, she didn't feel like it. She was clean but her coat still felt filthy from the smog and carnage. And her mind… her mind was trapped in a maze of pain and memories.

Suddenly she knew she just had to get away. She didn't know where, or how, but she was leaving. She looked out of the cave and her eyes set on the pink sun rising from the lake. There. She would go there.

Without another thought, without any pause to consider what she would do when she got there, she started to follow the sun. Desert-dust colored paws walking to a better place, a place painted pink and red and yellow. A happy place and a place of forgetting.

The sunrise was whatever she wanted it to be, for she would never reach it. But she didn't know that, so she walked with joy. And she didn't stop walking until she reached the sunrise, for when her paws could go no further and her body could not muster another step, her mind continued and reached the sunrise, where she stayed forever.