Apparently death was absent today, or else Finn was already so battered in appearance that he had mistaken her for deceased long ago, and thus denied her wishes. She groaned slightly at the prodding on her ribs, and opened one bleary eye. It took a moment for her cloudy gaze to focus, and what she eventually saw she did not expect. At first she had assumed it was Alastair, attempting to skewer her with his antlers in retribution for all the chiding nips she had given him over the years. But no, before her stood a tall, pale-furred luperci. Finn drew in a startled breath, which promptly turned into a lung-wracking cough. If she had more energy she would have turned tail and ran but as such she only managed to prop herself up with her forelegs..
“H-hail.” She managed, her mouth dry and heart beating like a startled rabbit through the brush. “I’d stand, but my legs seem to have failed me in my time of need.” Finn’s back legs gave an unenthusiastic twitch, indicating that they were, for the time, out of order. However, instead of numbness they had begun to tingle fitfully, and might soon bely her words. “I must sincerely apologize, if this is your territory,” Finn said, gesturing with her muzzle to take in the expanse before her. “I lose all sense of direction in hunger and the snow.”
She cast a wary eye at the wolf, taking in her entire height. Unnatural. Finn suppressed a shudder. Though she was not the stereotype spouting little daddy’s girl she had been before her brothers chased her away, she still nursed a suspicion for luperci. It was too strange how they walked on their back legs, like birds who had forgotten how to fly. And those paws, with that odd extra digit. It allowed them to do such unwolfish things. Unnatural. “Why haven’t you killed me yet?” The wolf asked cautiously, her shoulders tensed, waiting for the blow. Though she was not what she was when she was young, she still firmly believed that the luperci were bloodthirsty creatures. What’s more, she was trespassing on their land. A double offence..
She could see Alastair watching from the trees, even farther away now that the white wolf had made herself know. Finn didn’t blame him. She dearly wished for his seemingly unending vigour, so that she might leap and bound away from this place, to warmer climes full of fat and incautious prey. But alas, she was here, trembling with hunger and exhaustion, completely at the mercy of the she-wolf. In better times she might have fought to escape, in worse she might have run, but now she was pinned like a beetle, legs wriggling absurdly, waiting for death to finally clock in and swipe her away through cold, or violence or starvation. Finn would have laughed, if it wasn’t so ridiculous. She had almost died this way before, beneath her brothers fangs, then in the midst of a blizzard too fierce for her thin-skinned body. Life was circuitous, of that she had no doubt.