[html]
It had been some time since he had seen the skull lined borders of Inferni, but Laurel had not forgotten them. It was a peculiar place, one he had only visited a time or two and never for any length of time, but that could have been a description to anywhere in his life. Nova Scotia itself had been a brief stop, one laden with more bad than good, so it brought to question what exactly he was doing there, eyeing the pike-and-skull lined borders with a slowly coming-to sense of sobriety. The aging coyote could not have answered the question if it had been posed to him.
Itemless and weary, his ears were drooped just as much as his stance; his eyes threatened not to adjust to the darkness that was beginning to descend to the landscape. Just as well, he supposed. Not wasn't quite like him to be solo, but he had been for quite a while, perhaps giving up the lifestyle he had embraced in adolescence to something else entirely. Inferni had a reputation about it, one that he had encountered here and there from his prior stint in the region. He remembered Dahlia de Mai's uncouth creatures (or creature, it had been) that had once come across him. But the wolves that had been there were gone, he discovered.
Laurel had been around for a few days, no more or less. He had wandered in on memories and liquor, and the liquor was all gone. But the memories burned with such vivid light, and he had never considered himself the type to be sentiment, or the type to be attachments. But what was done was done, wasn't it? His glossy eyes decided to blank involuntary and they stayed closed for a moment. No matter, never you mind. He wasn't intent to destroy himself, but that had been the path lately. He had discarded everything he had once had and now there he was, standing slouched and bare at the borders of the only place he remembered that was still standing in some decent manner.
He could have started laughing, but his tongue was dry. But he swallowed anyway, trying to straighten out his own figure in the dim twilight, trying to regain the composure he had handed off to a long forgotten bottle which now rested at the bottom of some forest creek. But he called for no one where he would have had he wanted something, which wasn't to say he didn't want something. He wanted what everyone wanted, that much he knew in any state. Instead he played at the hand of luck, ticking off minutes he wasn't actually keeping track of and watching as the light crept back past him to the bottom of the unseen sea to his back.