The ground shivers. Pale gold and crimson leaves dance slightly, thumping above the earth in time to a silent beat. A puddle grown from Winter’s thaw begins to tremble and then, starts to swirl. For a moment the sky seems darker, the air tense with expectation of something to come, and then the tension bursts -

Two pale claws break free of the puddle’s surface, scrabbling for a muddy edge as they drag the refuse of Sylvian muck back down with them. Each grasping attempt exposes the creature more; first a snout that looks slick as oil, then the shape of a pale, sopping head and two gold-tinged shoulders to match. Painfully slow, Crevan the wolf works to free himself of a water portal before the sucking nonsense can close itself forever.

Halfway through he snarls - spits up a glob of the black liquid that coats his mouth and lets it splatter down his chin and onto the soil of Sylvian earth. “Release me!” He snarls to no one in particular, “Don’t let it get through!”

Yelping, Crevan can feel the sensation of an invisible force shove him, and as a result his hind legs pop free to fly over his head and twist his massive wolf shape into a flip. He slams back-first onto the earth, the air from his lungs expelling with a gust of pain and more black spittle. “That’ll do, I guess.” He thinks, scrambling to right himself and peer back at the muddy hole he’d just traveled through.

He waits, silently, black waste dripping spot by spot from the corners of his jaw, but nothing happens. “Her plan worked, then.” He thinks incredulously, hardly willing to believe it but the longer he waits, the more the silence presses in around him.

It was done. She was gone. Their worlds were safe again.

In the following minutes Crevan can only realize how little time they'd really been given. He’d thought perhaps … but no. He mustn't linger. He’d promised, and he’d make good on his end of that just like he said he would.

“Nyxa.” Is all he can think, and then the forgotten Shade of Sylva loses consciousness.

He could easily have slept for a thousand years.

It seems only right, after what he’s seen and been through. A thousand years is just a blink to an immortal, right? A thousand years is just a blink … Circinae whispers in his dreams, the sound echoing through his subconscious to send him racing through nightmares, one after the other. The Underneath rushes up to meet him and then it swallows him whole, erasing his shape to nothingness and then filling his innards with the same liquid Merida was so stubbornly trying to lick clean from his shut eyes.

His body turns to mush, splits like an overfull melon to sprinkle stardust across an empty galaxy and from there, he hardens into stone and is thrown across the heavens. A bright, blazing comet - so eager to streak past unnumbered constellations until, at last, the looming sphere of a strange, blue planet begins to grow in his foresight. Larger and larger it seems to expand but, really, he’s just pummeling towards it, spiraling wildly out of control as that same, strange earth sucks him into its gravitational orbit.

In a final, gallant display he explodes without ever touching the alien soil; splinters himself into a thousand fiery shards that rain down to fizzle out, and that is the last of himself that he remembers before consciousness grips him again with a painful awakening.

“Uugghhh.” He groans, not exactly a sentient answer but her whine had been then noise to bring him back from the precipice of … wherever he was. The she-fox yips; a shrill sound that grates against his ears and has his head throbbing. “Quiet!” He snaps, shifting only to swivel his head around and snap his teeth together at the offending creature but, when he sees her, the malice freezes on his blackened lips.

“ … Merida?” He remembers with a pleasant shock, dropping the snarl for a surprised expression instead. “You’re not dead?” He mutters, blinking a few times just to be sure.

He expected them all to be dead.

Every last one of them. Generations gone, in fact. Crevan finds it hard to believe that the feisty little shifter he left behind has barely aged - how long has he been gone? Or, how short of a time has he been away?

His head begins to throb again. Merida could be immortal like him, after all. She could simply be passing the time while another century has come and gone; not one of the flat-toothed pack animals here would consider her much of anything, if she chose to remain discreet and purely Fox. He means this in the nicest way - Merida was as crafty and witty as the second soul nestled close to her first.

She, like so few of the shifters around here, appreciated the freedom of a different skin. “It’s not the first time I’ve looked like this.” He mutters in a gravely tone. “And it certainly won’t be the last.” The wolf exhales as his companion flits away, feeling (for the brevity of a second) a tense sadness at her eager departure. Sleep is heavy on his eyelids though, so he readily succumbs to the darkness again and, this time, sleeps blissfully free of dreams.

Quiet paws bring her back to him, but it’s the smell of a fresh kill that has his eyes flicking open to glow hungrily in the encroaching darkness. Faint starlight swirls around her slender body, the halo of an expectant moon ringing her outline with silver fire. As she drifts away from him, Crevan adjusts; like two partners mimicking a dance he rises slowly on his forepaws and twists a stocky head over one thick shoulder to watch her present the hare.

“Some things have changed since I was gone.” He notices with stony composure - only, the tight press of his lips could be interpreted as a ‘smirk’. “I remember an unblooded curiosity; Now I see a rabbit killer in fine form.” He huffs, an attempt at laughter. With a delicacy he’d not mastered before, the taupe wolf hunkers down and gingerly relieves her of the prize. His wide jaws hold the meat limply, like Merida had before, and then his chin flexes and in one motion, he sears the animal entirely in half with a solid crunch of his teeth.

Both sides flop lifeless to the earth.

“Thank you.” He says afterwards, his nearly-black eyes rising to peer at her face. “Where are the rest of them?” Crevan asks as he slides once more to the ground, belly-flat. The one half of hare that belongs to him disappears beneath his looming mouth, a pleasant sound of tearing skin and snapping bones accompanying the action. Again his attention rises to the fierce she-fox, inquisitive eyes reading deeper into whatever she might say. His molars grind the bone to a soft paste as he chews; almost nothing is wasted when he eats these days.

“With you gone, there was no other shifter …” Merida tells him.

In her own way, he doubts she meant it negatively. In his mind, though, the words transform themselves to steel knives, each one plunging hungrily through his heart. He knows that what he’s done can’t be forgiven - not by Merida, not by his sister (a filly he’s never even seen, shame, shame on him) and certainly not by his father or twin, wherever they were now. His choice … no, their choice, for it’d been Circinae’s as much as his, had been irrevocably selfish.

He’d had friendship here; Merida was that, if not something more. Purpose; Celest had looked up to him, he realizes that now. Family; Canaan and Jah, Corvus and Nyxa.

Why had he left in the first place?

Chewing, ripping, the reddish-orange female fills in the blanks and draws him out from inside the prison of his thoughts. “Little nests, at the base of trees -” She rambles, I was quicker.”

Her laugh isn’t followed by one of his own. She reminds him too much of the things that hurt, things that mattered. Reminds him exactly why he’d left. This place - Beqanna - had felt too small to house his great bulk, too weak and delicate to withstand his violent nature. (The squirming, fleshy ‘babie’ rabbits, nestled in their spring dens as he devoured them one by one) He swallows, done with his half though Merida now works on a bone.

His tongue flicks out from the shadow of his mouth, running smoothly over the the oily substance covering his lips to clean the final, bloody residue, and Crevan has a feeling they will come around to the subject he wishes they would avoid. Merida, reading his thoughts, asks anyways. His mind drifts:

(They were staying in each new world for short bursts of time, aiming to outrun it. When once they’d been leisurely and involved, working hard to assume new lives and try new things, now they were harbingers of death - unintentional or not.)

“Some … thing.” Is the best answer he can give in regards to the black shit matting his fur. “My dam, Circinae, had the ability to teleport. She was never meant to stay in one place, but she wasn’t exceptionally powerful. I wasn’t meant to be a father, to be a lover, but I couldn’t stop myself from hurting people. So we left.” He explains briefly, before the memory sweeps over:

(In the beginning it was perfect. The first world they’d encountered had perpetually been a Tundra. Wolves ruled, and then he and his mother came to rule them, gods among their own kind. But that space was too small, too limited, so they left. And then, once that new place had become small, they would leave again, and again, and again. Over and over, starting from nothing and together, soon outgrowing every place they’d teleported to.)

“I think her ability was what drew the thing to hunt us. It … hungered for total destruction, ruined everything in its wake.” He frowns, the lines of his immortal face growing tight with anger. “Her gates, our jumps - they were like footprints behind us. No matter where we went, it would tear reality in order to find us.”

(Black death, and so much of it. The fabric of time would shred and it would spill free from the makeshift portal, shapeless and silent in its pursuit of them. Sometimes it would not find them for months, sometimes it was only a few days. Near the end, they had precious hours to plan. That was when Circinae had decided to stop running.)

“We went to a dark place.” Crevan breathes, just above a whisper. His eyes are gone, travelling through space and eternity to see that horrid darkness again, a world so much like the Underneath it was agony to think on it now. “I fought and for the first time, I felt true fear that I would die.” He mouths, remembering the way it had enveloped him completely and begun to drink his gifts away like a man stranded in the desert, lapping up drops of water.

(“It’s me you want!” Circy had screamed, not once but twice. Behind her, the portal that Crevan was supposed to be escaping into was already formed, mouth open and waiting. But the thing had been unsure - tasting Crevan had given it second thoughts, perhaps. The green mare wasn’t deterred - she never was, in the face of impending doom - and had fallen in to attack. That was all it took, all ‘it’ needed in order to free Crevan and turn to the object of its true desires.)

“But I stuck to our plan; I managed to make it through the portal and her move was to take the Creature … nowhere, I guess. A death sentence. To go ‘nowhere’ was to become ‘nothing’, and that was her sacrifice.” He rumbles, blinking softly before jerking his head away from Meridia’s inquisitive stare.

Silence follows. Eventually Crevan rises; one fluid, graceful motion where all his limbs worked in tandem because his thoughts were aligned on one purpose. “I need to run.” He snarls softly, choosing to avoid her gaze still.