Our skin gets thicker, living out in the snow
CREVAN
Their scent had been painfully obvious over the acrid, bittersweet stench of death. Jah-Lilah’s particular aroma had struck the sandy-colored wolf right in the nose; as soon as he’d drifted past another pile of bleached bones, it’d wafted up on a draft of warm, salty air and stopped Crevan dead in his tracks.
His ears flattened and his lips curled, the fur between his shoulders stood rigid in anger, but all the animosity he could muster wouldn’t be enough to change the fact that her trail was perhaps a day or two old at best. Lucky for her, because in that moment Crevan might have forsaken his vow to never take another life again.
Still, it was enough rage that he swallowed what little embers of the horse spirit he had left inside of him and allowed for the wolf to fully take over. Instinct guided the shaggy beast, driving his nose to the earth and his feet into a steady gallop so that he could leave the beach and its memories far behind. Ahead the plains and the fields stretched out with welcoming arms, their grass and silty earth falling flat underneath his immortal paws when the wolf passed over them.
As night drew up her black hood, Crevan broke past the first few saplings at the edge of the timid Forest and lost Jah’s scent to the pine and sap. Heaving a massive chest in exhaustion he snarled, gnashing white teeth in the darkness and jumping madly from root to root without much success at sniffing her out again. But he was close, so close; her scent was not so faint.
To the west lay Loess. To the north, Hyaline. The shape-shifter hedged his bets on the Eastern territories and spurred himself on through the woods, surmising that even if his guess had been wrong and Jah was not to be found in the city of mountains, the pure absence of her familiar smell would tell him before he ranged too deeply into protected land.
Like a wandering spirit, the wraith wolf soon passed into the outer hills of Hyaline and there he slowed to a padding walk. His eyes, barely lit by the backdrop of stars and a crescent of pale moon, seemed to glow with a life of their own as he heedlessly ignored the boundaries of the mountain horses and slunk deeper through the rocky valleys.
He would come across someone soon, or someone would come across him. Perhaps, he thinks, it may be exactly who I’m searching for.
@[Amet] @[Jah-Lilah]